News 1/13/16

Top News

The Meaningful Use program will be shut down soon, according to a series of tweets from CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt from the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. He says it will be replaced by outcomes-based measures, with details to follow in late March. The full transcript of Slavitt’s comments is here, in which he says:

The Meaningful Use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over and replaced with something better … the focus will move away from rewarding providers for the use of technology and towards the outcome they achieve with their patients. Second, providers will be able to customize their goals so tech companies can build around the individual practice needs, not the needs of the government. Technology must be user-centered and support physicians, not distract them. Third, one way to aid this is by leveling the technology playing field for start-ups and new entrants. We are requiring open APIs in order to the physician desktop can be opened up and move away from the lock that early EHR decisions placed on physician organizations so that allow apps, analytic tools, and connected technologies to get data in and out of an EHR securely. And finally, we are deadly serious about interoperability. We will begin initiatives in collaboration with physicians and consumers toward pointing technology to fill critical use cases like closing referral loops and engaging a patient in their care. And technology companies that look for ways to practice “data blocking” in opposition to new regulations will find that it won’t be tolerated.

From Iroquis: “Re: Andy Slavitt CMS tweets. Isn’t CMS prohibited from unilaterally commenting on MU or other policy changes? And ‘deadly’ serious – gimme a break.” I don’t know what he’s allowed to tweet about, but it does seem unusually frank. “Deadly” doesn’t seem like the best choice of words given the subject and I don’t know that showy Mom-like threats will change anything in the absence of specific definition, legislation, and investigation.

Reader Comments

From FlyOnTheWall: “Re: medical transcription and coding provider Amphion. The grapevine says it has been acquired by competitor IMedX, which if true would be one of the larger recent deals in the space as the HIM follows the EHR market in consolidating.” IMedX responded to our inquiry and confirmed the acquisition. We also reached an anonymous IMedX insider, who offered some unverified opinions:

• The IMedX CEO came from poorly regarded C-Bay and shifted the company’s emphasis from sales to mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a “rat’s nest” of 17 supported systems that are difficult to manage.
• The IMedX business model is to grow dangerously fast and hope to sell quickly to the highest bidder.
• The transcription market has been decimated by EHRs, so IMedX is trying to boost its coding revenue.
• Two recent company acquisitions saw their KLAS scores drop 10-20 points afterward.
• Amphion employees are being let go without notice. One found out that he had been fired when he couldn’t log in to his work computer.

From Ample Sample: “Re: Peds2040 conference last week. It was great and covered AI, big data, 3D printing, genomics, and health IT. I was blown away by how much cool stuff is going on at peds centers and by the energy, intelligence, and positive feelings there. This was a Patients Included conference, with patients and their parents involved both as attendees and speakers, helping attendees remember the humanity of what we do.” I hadn’t heard of Patients Included, which requires conferences that use its logo to attest that they will:

• Involve patients in the program’s design.
• Invite them as attendees to all sessions.
• Pay the travel costs for patients who are presenting.
• Accommodate any disabilities.
• Offer free streaming video when possible to support virtual participants.

From In the Wind: “Re: McKesson. Paragon employees jumping ship are being replaced by offshore employees. At least two clients that were moving from Horizon to Paragon have abandoned their efforts.” Unverified. Jenn is reaching out to current and former Paragon and Horizon customers to get a feel for what’s going on. Let me know if you’re one and willing to speak on or off the record.

From SeahawkDoc: “Re: new UCLA Health CEO Johnese Spisso. Word is that she left University of Washington Medicine because of an impending $500 million Epic price tag that she was previously championing. The CFO also retired at the end of 2015. Seems like no one wants to be left holding the hot potato.” Unverified.

From Little Caboose: “Re: HIMSS16. My employer has rejected my travel request. Should I spend $4,000 and use vacation time to meet friends and former colleagues and hopefully accelerate my job search?” I would spend the money in hopes of making the right contacts, especially since your employer has declined to pay and thus is questioning (a) your importance to them; (b) the value of the conference; or (c) their ability to fund the travel. Registration will set you back $865 if you sign up by February 2, although maybe you know a vendor who will slip you one of the exhibitor’s badges that they usually have in abundance. Bid an off-Strip hotel on Priceline for maybe three nights and don’t plan to spend much on food and entertainment because it will be everywhere at no cost. The biggest expense will be the flight, but you could even compare the cost of flying to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or other not-too-far cities and driving a rental car to Las Vegas. It will be worth whatever the cost if it lands you a better job, which could happen if you reach out to your contacts (through LinkedIn, for example) and let them know you’re interested in talking to companies that week.

From Supplemental Fluids: “Re: JP Morgan conference. Sign of a bubble!”

From Graying CIO: “Re: Meaningful Use. CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt said at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference that data blocking will not be tolerated. Interoperability and data blocking are two separate topics. Our lack of focus on making interoperability work (blame that we all share equally — vendors and health systems alike as well as a MU schema that undervalued actual data sharing) does not equal data blocking. There are many of us who do not have well-developed systems to share patient data easily. That does not mean that we are actively data blocking or seeking to retain information for our own gain.” The data blocking issue is receiving unwarranted government attention due to some poorly researched news stories that provided no evidence that the practice exists. The term suggests a level of intent that would be impossible to prove.

From Pee Gee: “Re: drive-up window of my local pharmacy. I thought you would get a kick out of the ‘HIPPA’ sighting!” It’s a slippery slope when people try to make unpronounceable acronyms into words because, as here, reverse engineering them back into the original acronym is fraught with potential error. We should have stuck with sounding out each letter or reducing the number of letters. How would you spell “JCAHO” (or now Joint Commission) if all you heard is people pronouncing it “Jayco?”

From Fly on the Wall: “Re: Mike Tarwacki, Zynx Health SVP of sales and marketing. Is out of the company for reasons unknown.” Unverified, but his executive bio page has been expunged.

From Rational Exuberance: “Re: DonorsChoose. The reader’s comment that it sounded like your write-ups are bragging is nuts. Your style in describing the wonderful results attained by small amounts of money is perfect and they are more likely to give when they can see the direct result. I’ve thought once or twice that you might overtly ask readers to contribute. The only thing you might to differently is add more photos of the faces of the recipients – the smiles and excitement about learning on their faces shows how much it’s worth it.” I’m uncomfortable asking readers to donate since everybody’s charitable works are their own business, so I’ve only provided instructions when someone asked. Readers can also donate directly to DonorsChoose and do what I do in finding worthy projects and matching funds. With regard to photos, I think some schools must have a policy of not running student photos since it’s sometimes apparent that they intentionally omitted or obscured the faces, which is understandable.

From Woodstock Generation: “Re: TPD’s comments about VNAs from last month. They make no sense. He said it’s easier to connect to an HIE with an electronic data warehouse instead of a vendor-neutral archive, not surprising since historically EDWs manage only discrete, ASCII, structured data. The ability to federate internal storage and external data sources is something mature VNAs have done for a while. Taking the ‘A’ (archive) out of PACS accounts for perhaps 10 percent of provider value, while robust VNAs also provide bi-directional, dynamic tag mapping as well as matching disparate (image) studies, something an HIE would require. In thinking about this, perhaps a better name for VNA would be EDW or perhaps Enterprise Service Bus, operating with all sources and types of data, storage, and applications.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Ms. Oelrich says her Wisconsin sixth grade class of at-risk students have become energized as they use the materials we provided (math manipulatives, calculators, and blank journals) in funding her DonorsChoose grant request. She reports, “In our math intervention group, students learned about fractions by playing our new Pizza Fraction Fun game. During this time, one student shouted, ‘Wait, this piece of pizza is a fraction of the whole! Math is so fun!’”

HIStalkapalooza

Signups are still open, so act now if you want to come. Several folks said “I signed up last year but wasn’t invited,” which must mean their company’s spam filter was hyperactive in rejecting my invitation since everybody who signed up was sent one. I’m amused that a couple of vendors had an admin sign up dozens of executives, a list I’ll enjoy trimming since people who can’t be bothered to sign up on their own usually don’t actually show up. Some vendors seem to think I’m throwing them a company party.

I’m a bit anxious that Sagacious Consultants has cancelled plans to handle the HIStalkapalooza check-in table again this year following the company’s acquisition by Accenture, which doesn’t want to participate. I could use a company’s help in providing a few folks to get everybody checked in, even better if they have experience with barcode-scanned invitations that would get everybody in the door more quickly. Let me know if your company can help.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the fun comments that folks added to their sign-up:

• I love the nightlife. I love to boogie.
• I’ve been a devout HIStalk follower since 2006, but have never been at HIMSS long enough to chase the Palooza dream. Hopefully this is the year I get to rub shoulders with the celebrities and snarkists, or I can assist with velvet rope bouncing since I’m bigger than their security. Thanks for all you do, keep breakin’ necks and writin’ checks.
• Thanks HIStalk for so many good reads over the years! You guys are routine part of my workday. Actually, since I moved from the east coast to the west coast, I read it every evening before I go to sleep. So thanks for all the evenings hanging out in my bedroom. I go to sleep now with a smile.
• Pretty sure it’s the best cardio I get every year. Who wouldn’t dance with that band?
• FYI, I am an informatics celebrity. As a long-time clinician and informaticist, have the dubious honor of being the first person in the United States to have been sued while documenting with an electronic record. The plaintiff’s attorney contended the record of care was not mine, as I had not written it, a machine had.
• I only seem to get to dance once a year. Hope to do so again!
• I’m 25, this is my first job out of college, and older women seem to love me. The older women thing is certainly a contributing factor as to why I’ve made the ever-shrinking list of people my company sends to HIMSS. Whatever, I’ve never been to Vegas so I guess I’ll take it. Here’s a haiku about HIMSS: “This place is a zoo, Wish I wasn’t hung over, Give demos all day.”
• I’ve been known to tip bartenders heavily and uncomfortably dance to the music, which in its own right is impressive given my lack of wealth and rhythm.
• Me! Me! Pick me! In exchange I will dance, smile, laugh and generally entertain all attendees within a fair radius of my being.

Only 17 sponsors have responded to our invitation to submit information for our HIMSS guide, so this is the final heads-up for those that haven’t. Contact Lorre or the guide is going out without your company’s information in it, which would be a shame. 

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

McKesson shares drop 10 percent Monday after the company lowers the upper range of its 2016 earnings per share guidance.

Health media company Healthline Networks spins off Talix, its risk management analytics software business.

The American Medical Association invests $15 million to launch for-profit incubator Health2047, naming venture capitalist Doug Given, MD, PhD as CEO.

DrFirst acquires the assets of mobile e-prescribing app vendor iPrescribe.net.

Higi, which offers retail health kiosks for measuring and rewarding consumer health metrics, raises $40 million in funding.

The management of Hayes Management Consulting buys out the ownership interest of founder Paul Hayes.

Sales

Partners HealthCare (MA) will use QPID Health’s quality reporting system to ensure that surgical procedure decisions are evidence based.

UPMC will implement Health Catalyst’s data warehouse and has licensed its cost management technologies and content to the company for commercialization.

Meridian Health (NJ) chooses Patientco for patient-friendly billing and payments.

Reconstructive Orthopedics (NJ) selects the eClinicalWorks EHR.

Marin General Hospital (CA) signs a $90 million, 15-year agreement with Philips, which will provide the hospital with imaging systems, patient monitoring, telehealth, and informatics technologies as well as consulting services.

People

Ron Wozny (ZeOmega) joins Healthx as VP of marketing.

University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers CIO Sue Schade resigns and will hang out her shingle to offer consulting, coaching, and interim management.

Capital BlueCross hires Scott Frank (Aetna) as CIO.

Sunquest hires Rob Atlas (Atlas Medical) as SVP of strategic solutions, Tom Arena (General Genetics) as SVP of North American sales, and Andrew Branski (GE Healthcare) as VP of finance.

Healthgrades names Scott Booker (Stella & Dot) as CEO. Former CEO Roger Holstein, who had been CEO since early 2012, will remain on the board but return to his venture capital firm.

Jonathan Cook (NCQA) joins Arcadia Healthcare Solutions as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

MindLeaf Technologies will offer Security Audit Manager from Iatric Systems along with its medical compliance and support services.

HCS extends access to its HCS Interactant Incident Management to the SaaS environment.

Government and Politics

Public research non-profit National Center for Policy Analysis criticizes the state of Texas for restricting the use of telemedicine, noting that the Texas Medical Board has resisted efforts to expand telemedicine “with the possible exception of patients few doctors want to treat – prisoners.” It also points out that Texas is one of two states (with Arkansas) that require a face-to-face visit first and one of three (with Alabama and Georgia) in requiring an in-office visit afterward, both of which it says are “striking considering Texas ranks 51 out of 51 (including Washington, DC) for access to medical care in the United States.”

Kentucky will shut down its $290 million Kynect state health insurance marketplace, moving signups to Healthcare.gov.

Privacy and Security

A South Carolina newspaper covers several instances in which a physician practice closed without warning, failing to tell patients how to get copies of their medical records. The state is considering new regulations that would set requirements for medical records protection when a doctor “is incapacitated, disappears, or dies.”

Other

A review of a national malpractice claims database finds 248 cases in which health IT caused patient harm, one-third of which involving medications. The authors conclude that technology-caused harm is more significant than previous studies suggested even when looking only at those incidents that triggered malpractice lawsuits. They recommend that organizations focus on higher-risk settings (ambulatory specifically) and common problems (medications and diagnostic errors) rather than attacking a list of specific technology problems.

The Denver paper observes that several executives of Denver Health Medical Center have quit since a new CEO took over, also noting that the health system will spend $170 million to implement Epic after eliminating 122 full-time nurse positions in 2013. The article adds that CIO Gregory Veltri parted ways with the organization after warning his bosses that the cost of the Epic project could balloon to $300 million.

The Boston business paper covers the switch from Meditech to Epic at South Shore Hospital (MA), which was a primary reason it had hoped to be acquired by Partners HealthCare until the state nixed the deal over antitrust concerns. Now they’re implementing Epic on their own at unstated cost.

Weird News Andy seems unduly fascinated by fecal transplant news, so he urges that we “don’t poo-poo this idea” in which scientists gut microbes from thin people in capsules that obese people will take to see if it makes them lose weight.

Sponsor Updates

• Burwood Group achieves Cisco Master Collaboration Specialization in the US.
• Atlanta Tech Village includes Clockwise.MD’s graduation in its list of 2015 achievements.
• CoverMyMeds recaps hosting Startup Weekend.
• Clinical Computer Systems, which offers the Obix perinatal data system, adds new videos to its Obix University.
• Valence Health signs a collaboration agreement with risk and benefits solutions vendor Aon.
• First Databank VP of clinical applications Dewey Howell, MD, PhD publishes “Improving care transitions in 2016.”
• Wellcentive CEO Tom Zajac offers “5 Population Health Management Predictions for Providers in 2016.”
• First Databank releases a new issue brief on medication adherence.
• Healthcare technology analysts and organizations honor Extension Healthcare throughout 2015.Blog Posts

Blog Posts

• Looking Ahead in 2016: More Consumerism and Innovation, Less Gadgets, Still Not Enough Interoperability (AirStrip)
• Transforming Healthcare: VITAS Embraces the Power of Mobile Devices (AirWatch)
• Improving Nutrition to Reduce Hospital Readmissions (Besler Consulting)
• The Paradox of Population Health (Caradigm)
• We’re Ready … Are You? 2016, Here We Come! (Divurgent)
• Meaningful Use Hardship Exception Signed into Law (E-MDs)
• Success Story: HIE Participant Connectivity – Powered by GalenETL (Galen Healthcare Solutions)
• Is Becoming an ACO the Right Choice for You? 5 Questions to Ask (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Using Standardized Care Plans to Drive Patient Engagement (Healthwise)
• What Do Healthcare and Stock-Car Racing Have in Common? (Spok)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 1/11/16

Top News

The Office for Civil Rights declares that it won’t tolerate providers who refuse to give patients copies of their medical records, publishing clarifications of what providers must do, with these examples:

• Covered entities must provide designated record sets to patients or their designee.
• They can verify the requester’s identity however they like as long as the verification process doesn’t delay the delivery of the information.
• They cannot require patients to physically visit their premises or mail a paper form to submit their request.
• They must offer records delivery by email if requested.
• They cannot withhold records copies just because the patient hasn’t paid for their services.
• They must provide requested electronic copies of paper documentation if they have a scanner.
• They cannot tell patients that, “We have a patient portal, so log in and print your own information.”
• The patient has a right to obtain all information about them, not just EHR data. That includes images, billing and payment records, claims data, and any information the provider used to make decisions about their care.
• They must provide electronic copies of information they store electronically if the patient requests electronic instead of paper. They cannot insist that the patient accept paper copies instead.
• Fees charged must be “cost-based,” which includes the labor required to make paper or electronic copies, supplies, and postage. The fee cannot include the cost of retrieving and verifying the information. This is a big deal since providers impose absurd per-page charges – often through their third party release of information vendor – even when providing information in electronic form. OCR is clear that federal law overrides state law in this case, so extra fees are not allowed even if state law says they are.

The question is what OCR does now that it has clarified the rules. Patients most likely don’t know how to file complaints despite widespread lack of provider compliance with these guidelines.

From my own experience in having filed an OCR complaint six months ago about a hospital that refused to give me an electronic copy of my electronic records resulting in no response, I doubt they are geared up to take fast action even when patients are knowledgeable enough to contact them.

Reader Comments

From Little Buddy: “Re: President Obama. This quote sounds like someone very much out of the loop who happens to have the solution to healthcare woes with Obamacare.” The President said, “I don’t have a Fitbit yet, but I work out hard. Word is these Apple Watches might be a good companion for my workouts. So I’m gonna see, I’m gonna test it out.” I actually think it’s kind of cool that he’s not afraid to drop some pop culture references and that he takes care of himself with technology help. Speaking of the Watch, I got stuck behind an older lady in the airport security line the other day who was confused about which items to place on the scanner belt, oversharing with the TSA agent, “I have an iWatch.” People apparently don’t even know the name of their expensive, short shelf life gadget, which is not called the iWatch because smart companies had already trademarked the name before Apple.

From Apollo Creed: “Re: health IT companies. Which ones do you like?” I don’t think my opinion is relevant, or if it is, it’s not available. It’s best that prospective investors and employees perform their own due diligence, especially since I’m not an investor or employee of any of them.

From DC VA Insider: “Re: VA CTO Marina Martin. Will be leaving soon.” Unverified.

From Rowdy Roddy: “Re: Leidos. I heard a Leidos ad on a Madison classic rock station. They are looking for Epic and Cerner help. Is the world that short of Cerner expertise that they have to find Epic folks, which themselves are in short supply?” I can’t imagine that many Epic youth spend their commute gramps-moshing to “Sweet Emotion” and “Sultans of Swing” in between Leidos commercials. There’s a business opportunity for you: launch an Internet radio station just for Epic or Cerner employees – including company gossip, the cafeteria menu, and customer news interspersed with Justin Bieber and Adele songs — and sell ads to consulting firms that want to poach them.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: iPhone 7. With Apple reducing the price of iPhone 6 Plus S by 30 percent, soon there had to be a reason. Now,we know why. The iPhone 7 leaks have started and sales will drop as everyone waits for the new model.” The cell phone and services market are changing quickly as competition heats up (thanks, Google, for creating Android). The major carriers are getting better and cheaper as they worry about upstarts and companies selling unlocked phones that use their networks at a discounted rate. A new Consumer Reports survey found that the worst-rated carriers for value are Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, as smaller providers like Consumer Cellular and Ting top the customer satisfaction scale.

Reader Gripes

• “Epic’s #6 list of principles says they don’t do deals, yet it’s hard to imagine Mayo wasn’t swayed by Epic’s $46 million offer to buy its data center.”
• “When I am alone with a patient, one on one, in an exam room and try to show caring and compassion, as I have always done over these many years as a clinician, it gets harder knowing that everyone and everything around this patient is treating them like the latest gold rush or oil boom. Their insurance company, hospitals and their administrators, pharmacies, medication manufacturers, many of my colleagues with their over-testing, etc. I do the best I can. I still think medicine is a noble profession and am proud that both my children wish to become doctors.”
• “It bothers me that you’ve created yet another forum to complain, like the comments section wasn’t enough. No one comes to HIStalk to hear people crap on companies or news, much less co-workers. I would rather see a Great Box, stories of awesome stuff people are doing in this industry. We don’t hear enough about the outcomes of our work.”
• “CommonWell members Cerner and McKesson, who claim to be in favor of interoperability, won’t allow us to interface to their systems even if we match the spec of one of their existing interfaces. Even though they interface to our competitors. Even though their own clients request it. Hypocrisy is alive and well.”
• “People that are more interested in building their fiefdoms than great companies.”

You can sound off about your gripe or you can even say something positive if you’d rather.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to the CIOs who volunteered to raise DonorsChoose funds by making themselves available to donating vendors at a lunch on Wednesday, March 2 at the HIMSS conference. CIOs interested in raising money for education by spending a couple of hours socializing with vendors can contact me.

About half of poll respondents will attend the HIMSS conference next month. A few more folks who attended in 2015 won’t attend vs. those who will attend, but I don’t think that necessarily portends lower overall attendance. New poll to your right or here: do company funding announcements make you curious to check them out?

Listening: Blackstar, the new album from David Bowie. The Thin White Duke is 69, but he eschews the profitable victory tour of mindlessly mumbling moldy hits in favor of creating complex, fresh music that throws down the gauntlet in setting the pace rather than wheezing to keep up with it. The album came about because Bowie saw a jazz band he liked and decided to perform some musical experimentation them. He just keeps doing his own thing, emerging from obscurity only when he has something new to say musically. The music is among his most experimental, the lyrics are hard to comprehend yet poetic and chilling (especially the title track), and it sounds like a real band with occasional boluses of electronica just to challenge the listener. It won’t change your mind if you don’t like Bowie, but it’s a gift if you do. UPDATE: a few hours after I posted this review, I was shocked to hear that David Bowie has died.

Mrs. K’s middle school science class in Brooklyn is using the iPad Mini we provided in funding her DonorsChoose grant request for researching STEM projects. She reports, “On behalf of my students, I want to thank you for your generous donation of an iPad mini. This gift will provide our students with real world connections to current research that will support all our ongoing investigations in our classroom. Curiosity and access to technology is the key to our success as productive Americans. Thank you for your support!”

My Christmas present to myself even though I don’t travel all that much is Global Entry, a known traveler program powered by fingerprint scan that lets you skip the line when entering the US by plane or car. It also includes TSA’s Pre-Check (shorter line, shoes and belt left on, laptop left in bag, metal detector instead of scanner), which is newly important since the days of free “upgrades” to Pre-Check often are about to end. Global Entry costs $100 for five years, only $15 more than Pre-Check alone. Every road warrior should (and probably does) have it. One might quibble that Department of Homeland Security is charging a premium to bypass its intentionally created inefficiency, but arguing that point with everybody else stuck in long lines doesn’t make sense unless you can’t spare $20 per year to save a lot of time and frustration.

HIStalkapalooza

Sign up to request an invitation for HIStalkapalooza. I have only about 400 requests so far, but I just announced it Friday.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Henry Schein Practice Solutions pays $250,000 to settle FTC charges that it overstated the database encryption technology used in its Dentrix G5 dental practice management system.
• Oncology software vendor Flatiron Health raises another $175 million, increasing its total to $313 million.
• The Rochester, MN paper reports that Mayo Clinic will run Epic hosted from Epic’s Wisconsin data center, while the data center Mayo sold Epic for $46 million will be used only for failover. The organizations will also work together to create new products.
• Health kiosk vendor HealthSpot shuts down.
• NantHealth acquires NaviNet to create a payer-provider collaboration network. 
• Navigant acquires 70-employee consulting firm McKinnis Consulting Services for $52 million.
• “Brain training” app vendor Lumosity pays $2 million to settle FTC charges that it made unproven claims that its software can reduce age-related cognitive decline.
• A local paper reports that Epic’s headcount has grown to 9,400, increased by 1,400 in the past year.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UltraLinq Healthcare acquires Cardiostream as the companies combine their medical image management expertise.

Several  Fitbit users sue the company, saying that its fitness trackers cannot accurately record heart rates during intense exercise even though the company markets them for that purpose. One of those users said her Fitbit showed a heart rate of 82 beats per minute when it was actually measured at 160, making the trackers “worthless.” In an interesting response, Fitbit stands by its technology but adds that its trackers “are not intended to be scientific or medical devices.”

Sales

Mount Nittany Medical Center (PA) chooses paperless electronic forms on demand from Access.

Announcements and Implementations

MedStar Health adds a “Ride with Uber” button to its home page that will hopes will make it easier for patients to keep their scheduled appointments on time. They should do something similar with discharged patients since, as bizarrely as it sounds, a top reason for extended length of stay is patients who can’t get a ride home and calling 911 for a free ambulance ride only works for those headed to – not from – the hospital.

Government and Politics

Two Phoenix VA executives who were suspended over scheduling wait times surface in new VA jobs 19 months after they were suspended with full pay and given a notice of termination that never happened.

The IRS says that 1.4 million households may lose their Healthcare.gov insurance subsidies because they they took government tax credits in advance last year but didn’t account for them in their federal tax returns. That means that 30 percent of households that received insurance subsidies handled the tax implications incorrectly. The announcement was made late Friday, when the federal government often releases unflattering information about the administration’s pet projects.

Other

@Cascadia caught this: Amazon is recruiting for a Leader, Global Healthcare for Amazon Business, the business-to-business supply marketplace it is building.

Nemours is considering IT as one of this areas in which it may reduce headcount.

Donna Walters, CIO of Sharon Regional Health System (PA), is hit by a car as she crosses the street in a crosswalk in front of the hospital. She is apparently OK, suffering a broken wrist. The driver, who was driving with a suspended license, was charged with a felony.

In bizarre healthcare news:

• Workers partially demolish a hospital in China that is still being used with patients inside, with locals suspecting that a company working on nearby roads ordered it removed (photo above left).
• In Russia, hospital security cameras capture a doctor killing a patient in the ED admitting area with a blow to the head after accusing the patient of touching a nurse, the most recent of several incidents in which the doctor used physical force on patients (photo above right).
• In New York, a patient commits suicide by jumping off a building and lands on Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital’s oxygen tank, forcing its ED to be evacuated.
• In South Sudan, 10 patients – including premature babies – have died because its main hospital has run out of money to fuel its electrical generators.
• In Cincinnati, the parents of a recovering seven-month-old baby overdose on heroin in the hospital. The mother died in the baby’s hospital room, while the father was arrested after being found in a hospital bathroom with a heroin needle in his arm and a loaded pistol in his pocket.
• A San Francisco group sues to halt construction of a new professional basketball arena near UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, saying, “Some people will die trying to get to the hospital if this stadium is built next to the emergency room.”

Sponsor Updates

• Extension Healthcare lists its 2015 awards and achievements.
• Caradigm publishes an infographic on electronic prescriptions for controlled substances.
• Valence Health CEO Andy Eckert will present at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, taking place January 11-15 in San Francisco.
• ZeOmega ranks number 54 on the 2015 SMU Cox Dallas 100.
• Strata Decision Technology publishes “Margin + Mission: A Prescription for Curing Healthcare’s Cost Crisis.”
• YourCareUniverse receives national recognition for innovative patient engagement tools.

Blog Posts

• Leading with Passion: Are You Contagious? (T-System)
• It’s time for a Patient Access Check-Up: 5 Strategies for 2016 (TeleTracking)
• Tightening Cloud Security with Role Segmentation and Isolation (TierPoint)
• To Cloud or Not to Cloud? (UltraLinq)
• Prepping for What’s Next in Risk Adjustment (Verisk Health)
• How Our Client Services Team Gave Back this Holiday Season (VitalWare)
• Healthcare’s Tower of Babel (Voalte)
• Healthcare Security in an “Internet of Things” World (Xerox)
• Revenue Cycle Best Practices (Impact Advisors)
• A Look Back at 2015 (ZirMed)
• New Year’s Resolution – “Getting” Patient Engagement (NextGen)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

HIStalk 2016 Reader Survey Responses

I run an HIStalk reader survey once each year, inviting anyone to provide feedback and ideas. This year’s survey generated 396 responses, with the highlights summarized below.

Years in the industry
More than 20: 46 percent
11-20: 26 percent
1-10: 28 percent

Employer type
Vendor: 43 percent
Hospital: 28 percent
Consulting firm: 17 percent:
Other: 12 percent

Primary job
IT staff/management: 26 percent
Vendor management: 17 percent
Vendor staff: 17 percent
Clinician in an IT role: 7 percent
CIO: 6 percent
CEO: 5 percent
CMIO: 2 percent
Other clinician: 2 percent
CFO: 1 percent
Other: 17 percent

Elements appreciated in order of most to least popular
News
Rumors
Headlines
Humor
Dr. Jayne
Interviews
Readers Write
CIO Unplugged

I have a higher interest in companies when I read about them in HIStalk
True: 84 percent
False: 16 percent

Reading HIStalk helped me perform my job better in the past year
True: 88 percent
False: 12 percent

Respondents provided these suggestions that I thought were most important, which I’ll list with my comments. The one I won’t mention is “don’t change anything,” which was thankfully by far the most common response.

Respondents also suggested a lot of new areas I should cover in the same way I write HIStalk, but I don’t have the time or interest to stray far from healthcare IT and thus will most likely not be able to pursue those areas (but it’s pretty cool that someone thinks I’m the guy to cover them anyway).

Thanks to everyone who took the time to provide their advice. It renews my energy every year right about this time. I also promised to randomly draw a respondent to receive a $50 Amazon gift card, but then I decided to make it two respondents instead – those folks have received their prize.

Include more rumors because they nearly always pan out.
I run all the rumors I hear or receive and always welcome submitting more. Some respondents scolded me for running unverified rumors.

Do more reviews of books that are supposed to make me better and to educate me about what’s right for patients, families, and providers.
I’m happy to do that given the limits of time and my willingness to purchase books just to review them. Most of those books I’ve reviewed came from reader suggestions.

Limit Readers Write to less vendor and consultant PR.
I’ve tightened up the requirements and rejected quite a few submitted articles, but the real issue is that only vendors and their public relations firms take the time to write something. Everybody likes to read, but nobody likes to write, as evidenced by the folks who want to read more reader submissions but don’t write anything themselves. However, some articles are good and I’m reluctant to shut down reader submissions just because some aren’t.

Do more interviews.
I only interview CEOs for the most part on the vendor side, but I’ll interview different kinds of provider folks – CIOs, CMIOs, nurses, informatics experts, etc. It’s a bit tricky because quite a few people can’t be interviewed without the approval of their employer.

Get more contributors, such as CNIOs and CIOs. Dr. Jayne is no longer a CMIO and most of what Ed Marx posts is off topic.
Most people don’t have the interest or time to contribute, but I’m willing if they are. Just about everybody who has ever vowed to overwhelm me with frequent posts drops out after the first 2-3 when they realize that it’s more work than fun for them. Dr. Jayne and Ed have many fans.

Provide less commentary.
More folks chose “provide more commentary” in explaining the background of stories, which I do if I feel like I have something relevant to add.

Do more investigative and original reporting, following up on rumors.
Good idea if I can figure out how to make it happen. I’ll take that as a to-do.

Cover more about AMIA, CHIME, ACHE, AMDIS, RSNA, and review articles from academic publications.
I don’t really have any connections with those groups and it would be tough (and expensive) to get away to attend all of their meetings. I’ve tried a few times to get a clinical informatics expert to scan the literature and summarize the important articles, but have had no luck so far. I need to find a way to get electronic journal library access from home and then I could review some of the articles myself if I don’t find someone.

Define the acronyms you use in stories.
I keep thinking about publishing an always-updated acronym list. Maybe I should do that. Of course it’s also easy to Google a term as long as it’s not used in multiple ways.

Run a column of anonymous gripes people want to say to their bosses, students, colleagues, etc.
Great idea, although my experience is that it would dry up quickly due to lack of submissions. Another respondent said I should set up an electronic complaint box and run the results – I like that idea and have put it in place.

Do videos or podcasts.
I’m not a fan of watching or listening to something I could read myself a lot more quickly. I’ll think about it, but that’s one of those things lame sites do (along with writing over-sizzly headlines and tweeting pointlessly) that I like to think most of my readers wouldn’t enjoy in proportion to the effort involved.

The DonorsChoose project is important work, but it looks like you are bragging about your donations. Are the donations tax deductible to the donor?
All of the DonorsChoose projects I write up are paid for by reader donations, to which I apply any and all matching funds I can find. I don’t publicize the DonorsChoose projects that I fund personally. The DonorsChoose donations are indeed tax deductible – the folks there came up with a “gift card” method in which they donate directly to DonorsChoose and I just pick the projects to fund with their money. I try to make it clear that the projects are funded through the generosity of HIStalk readers and I hope that we can all celebrate the results.

How about creating a discussion board?
I could do that, but I’ve tried a couple of times and participation was minimal. Quite a few attempts to create a health IT social network failed miserably because the folks involved took a “build it and they will come” position and, fact is, the industry is 99.9 percent readers and 0.1 percent writers.

Offer a job board.
I already have one. It doesn’t get much use.

Provide an annual summary by company of the news you ran about them.
I’ve thought about that, although I’m not sure who would need that information. It wouldn’t be hard since anything that appeared in HIStalk already passed the “is this really newsworthy?” filter.

Reveal your true identity when you retire or die.
I would hope that nobody really cares at this point since I’ve been doing it for 13 years and I’m not looking for recognition, but I keep thinking (somewhat morbidly) that I should write a “posthumous use only” post to say goodbye and perhaps squeeze in one more music recommendation instead of just leaving up whatever news post I wrote last. I fear being like an actor who dies with their IMDB list of appearances being capped by an awful movie role they shouldn’t have taken.

Morning Headlines 1/8/16

Dental Practice Software Provider Settles FTC Charges It Misled Customers About Encryption of Patient Data

Henry Schein Practice Solutions pays $25,000 to settle FTC charges alleging that the encryption used in its Dentrix G5 dental practice management system was not true encryption. Schein also makes the dental solution included in Leidos’ winning DHMSM bid.

Flatiron Health Raises $175 Million Series C Round to Further Bolster its OncologyCloud Software Platform for Providers and Accelerate Personalized Medicine

Oncology software vendor Flatiron Health closes a $175 million Series C funding round led by Roche, bringing its total funding to $313 million since its 2012 launch.

Top 9 issues that will affect physicians in 2016

The American Medical Association lists Meaningful Use, health data security, and the large-scale adoption of telemedicine as some of the top issues that will affect physicians in 2016.

Mayo plans more collaboration with Epic Systems

Mayo Clinic reports that it will only lease a small portion of the data center it recently sold to Epic, but confirmed that Epic will host its EHR platform at a larger data center in Verona.

News 1/8/16

Top News

Henry Schein Practice Solutions will pay $250,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it overstated the data encryption level used in its Dentrix G5 dental practice management software. Schein also agreed to let its customers know that its product does not use Advanced Encryption Standard as NIST suggests in complying with HIPAA requirements. You may recall that the Leidos consortium that won the Department of Defense EHR bid includes Henry Schein’s Dentrix Enterprise,which I assume is a different product.

Schein has updated its website to indicate that it no longer calls its database security “encryption,” explaining, “Available only in Dentrix G5, we previously referred to this feature as encryption. Based on further review, we believe that referring to it as a data masking technique using cryptographic technology would be more appropriate.”

Reader Comments

From Punditry: “Re: things you could add to HIStalk. How about a gripe box where people can anonymously vent about a company, news item, or person that annoys them?” That could be fun. I created an anonymous Gripe Box form. Let’s see if anyone has something entertaining to complain about. I like just about anything that personalizes a sometimes impersonal industry.

From Topanga: “Re: another HIPPA sighting. In a click-baity headline besides.” They fixed the HIPAA misspelling in the questionably health IT-related story afterward.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Attention CIOs: Centura SVP/CIO Dana Moore raised a lot of money for DonorsChoose at the last HIMSS conference by offering to meet with any vendor in return for their donation. We’re thinking about expanding it in Las Vegas by having other CIOs participate, where vendors who have made a DonorsChoose donation will be given a couple of minutes to pitch to the assembled CIOs and then mix and mingle during the lunch that we’ll provide. If you are a CIO who can spare two hours during lunchtime on Wednesday, March 2 during the conference for a great charitable cause, let me know.

Thanks to everyone who completed my reader survey and provided good advice. I’ll recap the results in Monday’s post.

Mrs. Torres sent photos of her Texas pre-kindergarten students using the two Kindle Fire Kids Edition tablets we provided by funding her DonorsChoose grant request.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Doctors Administrative Solutions rebrands after acquiring ConXit Technology Group. The Orthopedic Institute of Wisconsin selects RCM tech from McKesson BPS. CES gives the notorious HIMSS taxi queue a run for its money. Vecna Technologies puts a designer spin on patient vitals, while President Obama touts Healthcare.gov in Jerry Seinfeld’s car. Momentum Physical Therapy upgrades clinical and financial software. DuPage Medical Group secures a $250 million investment. Covenant Surgical Partners selects PM and RCM tools from gMed.

This week on HIStalk Connect: CES kicks off in Las Vegas, bringing a number of notable digital health announcements. Under Armour introduces its UA HealthBox, which includes a fitness tracker, wireless scale, and heart rate monitor. Fitbit, Fossil, and Healbe unveil new wearable devices of their own. Hometeam raises a $27 million Series B to expand its caregiver platform.

HIStalkapalooza

The “I want to come” form for HIStalkapalooza is open. Submit your information if you want to attend – even if you’re a sponsor, long-time supporter, or VIP, I still can’t invite you if I don’t know you want to come. I’ll follow up with actual invitations in a couple of weeks.

We had a couple of companies interested in our top-tier “HIStalkapalooza Rock Star” event sponsorship that couldn’t make it happen. The event goes on regardless, but without a few niceties and additional attendees that having a primary sponsor would have provided. We have about a week remaining before we have to move forward, so contact Lorre if your company is interested and can commit quickly. It’s really expensive to put on an event at this scale.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Northwell Health (the former North Shore-LIJ) and consulting firm Newport Health form Health Connect Technologies, which will commercialize population health management products. The joint venture was announced in August 2015, at which time I expressed some puzzlement as to who Newport Health is given its apparently intentional obscurity: “I couldn’t find much of anything on Newport Health other than it’s apparently connected to Newport Private Group with a real office in Newport Beach, CA and mail drawer addresses in New York and Texas.” Bean Enumerator’s pithy comment at that time was, “Newport says it has experienced and innovative health IT talent, but the only person listed as working for the company has no relevant experience whatsoever. It’s a bad sign when an investment banker starts a health IT company. How did Allscripts lose this one given their supposedly tight partnership with NS-LIJ and their population health management aspirations?”

Pamplona Capital Management invests an unspecified amount in Patientco and will embed the company’s patient payment products into those of its other holdings, MedAssets and Precyse.

An India-based newspaper profiles CitiusTech, which has doubled its revenue to $100 million since 2014 and expects to grow at 35 percent annually as it expands beyond its primarily US customer base. Co-founder Rizwan Koita says entrepreneurs focus too much on raising venture capital, having bootstrapped the company until it reached $50 million in revenue and 1,000 employees in 2014. The company is investing its 2014 $100 million investment from General Atlantic in expanding its capabilities in analytics, big data, and mobility.

Health kiosk vendor HealthSpot shuts down, turning off its kiosks in Ohio Rite Aid drug stores and Cleveland Clinic. The company had raised $23 million. 

Oncology software vendor Flatiron Health raises $175 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $313 million. The lead investor in the round is drug company Roche, which takes a board seat with the investment. GV (the former Google Ventures) led the Series B round in mid-2014.

Here’s a great tip from @RasuShrestha: registration is free for accessing live and recorded webcasts from the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference next week. Perhaps that will soothe our egos at not being invited to attend in person.

Allscripts and Medfusion announce that they have settled their legal differences over Allscripts reselling Medfusion’s patient portal, but then favoring the product it acquired from Jardogs in 2013.

Sales

Sutter Health (CA) chooses QPID Health’s query and clinical reasoning software to mine its Epic EHR for actionable information.

Franciscan Alliance (IN) chooses Vocera for secure clinical communications.

People

PeraHealth hires Sloan Clardy (Parallon) as SVP/chief growth officer.

Rick Adam (Recondo Technology) joins Stanson Health as president/COO. Long-timers will remember him as founder of New Era of Networks and president of Ibax.

Announcements and Implementations

In Canada, Grace Hospital is testing patient flow software from Kitchener-based Oculys Health Informatics.

Validic launches VitalSnap, a mobile app that allows consumers who use in-home medical devices that have limited digital connectivity to capture the information via their smartphone’s camera, have it translated using optical character recognition, and send it to their provider.

Sensato will launch its Cybersecurity Tactical Operations Center next month, which will offer services to small and large provider organizations via a membership model that can include real-time monitoring, planning, threat intelligence, emergency support, and testing (phishing, social engineering, and penetration). It will also offer biomedical device monitoring.

Prestige Emergency Room (TX) goes live with Wellsoft EHR, designed specifically for freestanding emergency centers.

Government and Politics

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker announces plans to create a digital health hub that will offer accelerator space and networking opportunities.

Privacy and Security

Application security auditing vendor FairWarning announces that all NHS Scotland hospitals are using its privacy monitoring software.

Technology

Surgeons at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital (FL) use the $20 Google Cardboard virtual reality smartphone accessory to plan a child’s heart surgery. You can actually get a better deal on Cardboard from eBay – just $2.99 with free shipping. Or you could spend $599 for the just-released, Facebook-owned Oculus Rift, which is finally almost ready to ship.

Other

The American Medical Association lists the top issues that will affect physicians this year, among them the “burdensome” Meaningful Use program, insurance company mergers, narrowing provider networks with increased out-of-pocket costs, soaring prescription drug costs, health data security, and elimination of telemedicine barriers.

The Rochester, MN paper says Mayo Clinic will lease back only part of the data center it sold to Epic for $46 million. The article suggests that Mayo will have Epic host its implementation from Verona, while Epic will use the Rochester data center to store backups and as a failover location for Mayo and other of its customers. That sounds like pretty big news that Epic is apparently doing full hosting for Mayo, a model Epic is just beginning to embrace. Mayo says it will also help Epic develop software and services that Epic will roll out to its customer base.

I’ve seen quite a few recent examples where headline writers misstate the relationship between public health and geographic location, as in , “Where you live has an enormous impact on health, well-being.” If that were true, moving would fix the problem. It’s only true that where someone live reflects certain aggregate health determinants – a ZIP code doesn’t impose its will to make someone unhealthy.

ECRI Institute lists its top technology advances to watch for in 2016, with the health IT-related ones being medical device cybersecurity and wearables.

A New York Times survey of insured Americans under 65 finds that 20 percent of them had problems paying their medical bills last year as insurance companies raised deductibles and co-insurance. Of those who had problems with medical costs, 63 percent spent all of their savings, 42 percent took on a second job or worked more hours, 14 percent moved or took in roommates, and 11 percent resorted to charity.

Sponsor Updates

• PatientPay reports that Women’s Health Care Group of PA has shortened payment time to less than nine days and reduced billing expenses by 30 percent after implementing the company’s paperless billing solution.
• Healthgrades SVP Mayur Gupta explains how marketing technology could transform healthcare.
• MedData will exhibit at the ACEP Reimbursement & Coding Conference January 11-13 in New Orleans.
• The Jacksonville, FL TV station runs a video story about HCI’s global expansion featuring CEO Ricky Caplin.
• Crossings Healthcare Solutions publishes its Q4 newsletter.
• Huron Consulting Group announces several promotions to managing director in the healthcare practice.
• Experian Health publishes a new white paper, “Collect Now or Pay Later.”
• PerfectServe CEO Terry Edwards is featured in a Global Big Data Conference article on health IT trends in 2016.
• A Recondo Technology survey finds that manual insurance claims follow-up costs providers around $4 per claim vs. the previously accepted $3 as those providers don’t use exception-based technology.
• GNYHA adds Phynd’s Unified Provider Management software to its contract portfolio.
• PMD enhances its secure text messaging software to allow users to invite others to join at no additional cost.

Blog Posts

• Top Healthcare Concerns for 2016: Technology and Cybersecurity (ID Experts)
• My EMR: Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Impact Advisors)
• Success Sells (Ingenious Med)
• New Approach to Open Enrollment: The Key Role of Healthcare Payment (InstaMed)
• Lab Information Management Systems Out of Step with Industry Changes (InterSystems)
• Good things come in small packages – how microservices help continuous integration and continuous delivery (Liaison Technologies)
• 5 Predictions for the Consumer Healthcare Experience: What They Might Mean to Your Life … and Death (Medecision)
• The Most Popular Nordic Blog Posts of 2015 (Nordic)
• My EMR: Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Impact Advisors)
• Does Stickiness Have a Role in Modernizing Health Systems? (NTT Data)
• How to Keep ACO Operational Costs Under Control (Orion Health)
• You have a plethora of patient data points. Now what? (PatientSafe Solutions)
• New Year, Familiar Challenge (PatientKeeper)
• The battle of the body cams (Lexmark)
• Silicon Valley Doesn’t Have a Thing on the Silicon Prairie (Phynd Technologies)
• Let Your Secure Messaging System do the Sending for You (PMD)
• Improving Denials Management (Streamline Health)
• If it’s Valuable, They Will Come: Electronic Medication History Use Increases More Than 100 Fold (Surescripts)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 1/6/16

Top News

NantWorks and NantHealth acquire eligibility and benefits management software vendor NaviNet, explaining that, “we are now poised to be the nation’s leading healthcare collaboration network by transforming the payer-provider relationship to evolve from transactions to interactions and finally to collaboration,”adding that NaviNet Open will serve as a web portal for cancer patients and providers. NaviNet sold its PM/EHR customer base, which was using rebranded versions of CureMD products, to CureMD in 2013 in continuing its focus on payer-provider collaboration tools. NaviNet was in 2012 acquired by Silicon Valley investor John Doerr’s Essence Healthcare, which I believe still owns ClearPractice and Lumeris.

Reader Comments

From Walter: “Re: health systems moving to Epic or Cerner. If you want to predict those, start with a list of McKesson Horizon and then Paragon clients.” I haven’t seen the numbers of Horizon customers who have followed McKesson’s hopeful suggestion that they replace their now-retired system with Paragon, but I’m guessing they are negligible.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: WiFi HaLow. At the Consumer Electronics show this week, the WiFi Alliance announces a new service called WiFi HaLow. It will bring a longer-range, low-power WiFi application that could benefit the patient engagement initiatives in healthcare as well as applications in other healthcare areas.” HaLow also penetrates walls better, which coupled with longer ranges and less battery drain should make device connectivity (including wearables) more practical. Unlike Bluetooth, HaLow connects devices directly to the Internet, not just to a smartphone.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Quite a few folks in health IT-land like this recent Dilbert, which might be the perfect preview (or replacement for) the HIMSS conference techno-blather.

Ms. Brown from Michigan sent photos of students in her K-3 special education resource room using the math puzzles and learning centers we provided by funding her DonorsChoose grant request.

I was thinking about the HIMSS conference and that my least-favorite US city — Las Vegas — has the perhaps unique distinction in that its residents indignantly scorn tourists who pronounce its state name correctly as “nev-AH-dah” instead of the local version “nev-AD-ah,” which is probably an ongoing challenge given that 75 percent of the state’s residents were born elsewhere. I suppose it’s like cities whose names we Americanize (i.e., we say it wrong) as we scorn those who say the name correctly (Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, and probably a bunch more). My go-to example for the odd-but-universal pronunciation is the Empire State Building, which you and everyone else say as “empire STATE building” even though New York is the Empire State and therefore the name should be pronounced “EMPIRE state building.”

Listening: the new and first EP from Cado Young, a couple of young guys (one of whom I’ve met) who have created some polished, hard-edged alternative music that deals maturely with the human condition.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mayo Clinic sells its data center to Epic for $46 million and will lease it back from its EHR vendor. That’s news everywhere except here since reader Sturges said exactly that in as a perfectly accurate Rumor Report from April 6, 2015.

Navigant acquires 70-employee McKinnis Consulting Services for $52 million to expand its revenue cycle management consulting practice.

Healthfinch raises $7.5 million in a Series A funding round, planning to use the money to complete development of its EHR “extender tool” that will expand its business beyond automated prescription refill management technology. The 30-employee Healthfinch was founded by biomedical engineer Jonathan Baran and Lyle Berkowitz, MD.

Minneapolis-based virtual care technology vendor Zipnosis raises $17 million in Series A funding, with Ascension Ventures and Fairview Health Services participating. The company offers a white-label virtual care portal for provider groups in which patients answer online questions and are then triaged to an appropriate clinician.

Pre-surgery patient portal software vendor One Medical Passport receives a $4 million Series A investment.

Smart pill bottle manufacturer SMRxT, whose name veers off the “distinctive” roadway into the “utterly unpronounceable as written” swamp, moves its headquarters from New York to Orlando. The company pronounces its name “Smart” in ignoring its own un-clever “Rx” pun and incorrect capitalization that renders the entire nomenclature exercise baffling, making me question whether it employed too much or too little marketing expertise.

Imaging technology vendor Sectra acquires Sweden-based RxEye, which offers a medical imaging collaboration platform.

People

Healthwise promotes Adam Husney, MD to chief medical officer.

Microsoft senior director of worldwide health Bill Crounse, MD retires from the company.

Privacy and Security

Hackers take down three electric power substations in the Ukraine by installing malware packaged as Microsoft Office document macros, with the resulting blackout sure to cause concern that similar actions could affect healthcare facilities if careless employees (was that redundant?) open documents from unknown sources.

Technology

Twitter will expand the 140-character Tweet limit to as many as 10,000 characters as it had already done for private messages. The downside is that plenty of Tweeters were already stretching the limits of their appeal within their allotted count of 140, now giving them the opportunity to move from “dull” to “insufferable.” On the upside, people were already kludging around the limit by taking screenshots of text anyway. Maybe a compromise would have been to expand the character limit while imposing a tweets-per-day cap.

Other

Critics question whether BMJ (the cute name that replaced British Medical Journal) has turned itself into a populist magazine rather than a scientific journal with its sometimes poorly researched editorial campaigns. The editor in chief acknowledges that it’s a fine line, explaining, “Some people would say we have gone too far down the magazine route. But we have no doubt that we’ve increased our influence and increased our readership among clinicians.”

“Brain training” games vendor Lumosity will pay $2 million to settle FTC charges that it made unfounded claims that its software can help reduce age-related cognitive decline.

The bad news is that a year’s worth of a new drug for pulmonary artery hypertension will cost a patient’s insurance $170,000, based on the price set by its manufacturer that expects to sell more than $1 billion worth per year. The good news is that it’s still cheaper than existing drugs for the same condition. The more-bad-news is that insurance companies will surely pass the cost along to the rest of us because that’s how insurance works, meaning everybody is happy except the majority of Americans who don’t have the condition who are paying big premiums without getting much in return.

The New York Times observes that millions of Americans are declining to buy medical insurance since it’s more expensive than the penalties involved in not buying it, capturing some interesting logic from the folks they interviewed:

• One woman says it’s better to die if something catastrophic happens, defying the government to collect the $1,500 fine she will owe in electing not to buy insurance.
• A man who doesn’t like poor out-of-network coverage comments, “I’m just going on the hope that nothing bad is going to show up until I get a full-time position somewhere or there’s better choices.”
• An artist who dropped his $455 per month plan that covered “zero medical expenses” says, “You’re asking a bunch of people to basically just give money into the system when they have an option not to,”
• A woman who says she just keeps antibiotics in her home rather than buying insurance says, ““I do not believe it serves the public good to entrench private insurance programs that put actual care out of reach for those they purport to serve,” adding that she hopes any disaster happens while driving since her auto insurance covers personal injury.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD staff donates 4,402 pairs of socks to The Road Home, a social services agency that helps the homeless in Salt Lake City.
• VentureBeat profiles AirStrip’s work with the University of Michigan and IBM to predict when a patient will become ill.
• Aprima Medical Software donates a record eight tons of food to needy families in the Dallas area as part of its annual food drive.
• CareSync CEO Travis Bond will speak in March at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Houston.
• The Times of India features CitiusTech HR VP Sowmya Santhosh and her thoughts on accommodating different personalities in the workplace.
• Divurgent releases a white paper, “Population Data: Healthcare’s Critical Success Factor for Health Management.”
• E-MDs selects Dell Children’s Medical Center for its 2015 holiday giving program.
• The local business paper profiles new GE Healthcare CEO Lee Cooper.
• Greencastle Associates Consulting recounts the part it played in Einstein Medical Center’s EHR rollout.
• The Huntzinger Management Group ranks number 10 in Consulting Magazine’s list of fastest growing firms of 2015.

Blog Posts

• Serving the American Healthcare Revolution (AirStrip)
• Why IME Shadow Bills are Missed (Besler Consulting)
• Expanding Your Population Health Data Foundation to Claims and Beyond (Caradigm)
• ROI and Clinician Satisfaction – Yin and Yang (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Building HIT in CLE (CoverMyMeds)
• Spok Execs Muse on What’s in Store for 2016 (Spok)
• ICD-10 Impact on Covered Preventive Services (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Looking Back at a Solid 2015 (EClinicalWorks)
• Galeneers Volunteer: Holidays 2015 (Galen Healthcare Solutions)
• When Making Go-Live Priorities, Don’t Forget the Knowledge Transfer! (Hayes Management Consulting)
• The Top 10 Most Popular EHR Blog Posts of 2015 from The HCI Group (The HCI Group)
• Forty Years of Building Trust (Healthwise)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

Monday Morning Update 1/4/16

Top News

The Madison paper reports that Epic’s headcount has increased to 9,400, up 1,400 in the past year. Campus 4 and Campus 5 are under construction and will add 3,500 offices and the company is sharing the cost of expanding Nine Mound Road to four lanes to handle Epic employee traffic. The company also announces that it has 360 healthcare organization customers in 10 countries and booked $1.8 billion in 2014 revenue.

Reader Comments

From Crank Caller: “Re: McKesson. I agree with your prediction that it will divest its health IT business. I’ve heard from two reliable sources within McKesson that Paragon is for sale, not that anyone would want to buy it.” Unverified, but the company seems to be constantly apologizing for its health IT business, it hasn’t produced great numbers, the Better Health 2020 initiative doesn’t seem to get much airplay after an initial big splash, and the company has shut down product lines like Horizon. With the retirement of Jim Pesce, anything could happen.

From Simmering Stock: “Re: 2015 share price performance. Some vendors are traded on non-US exchanges.” I intentionally limited my list to companies whose shares trade on US exchanges, but some that don’t are:

Pro Medicus (parent company of Visage Imaging), Australian Securities Exchange: up 191 percent
Craneware, London Stock Exchange: up 68 percent
Orion Health, New Zealand Stock Exchange: down 45 percent

From HIPAA Shake: “Re: your medical records request. Did you ever hear back from the Office for Civil Rights?” I filed a complaint in July with both OCR and the hospital that refused to provide me with an electronic copy of my medical records (the hospital claimed it is required to do so only for providers and patients can only get printed copies). I haven’t heard back from either organization. Good thing I haven’t been comatose for the six months with my doctor anxiously waiting to see what happened during my one-day stay in early 2014.

From EHR Product Manager: “Re: LA Times op-ed piece on physician working conditions. I left a faith-based academic medical center to work on the vendor side, which definitely has a better work environment. The AMC emphasized work-life balance but I couldn’t get them to let me work remotely even one day a week, which is a given in the vendor world. Is healthcare seeing a brain drain due to perceived lack of perks?” The Stanford medical student’s article says it’s easy to understand why the school’s graduates often forego residency to jump straight into industry in contrasting their environments: the working conditions for low-pay medical residents involve fluorescent lights, endless pages, and cell-like on call rooms, while business school students ride fancy buses to tech companies that provide free gourmet meals, gyms, massages, and on-site services such as bike repair and yoga classes. I would hope that those who choose to pursue professions such as medicine or the ministry don’t expect the eye-popping perks awarded to a tiny percentage of the young workforce who are chosen to work at Google or Facebook (or Epic, for that matter) — I’d rather see the folks who are torn between patient care and Silicon Valley just hire on with Google instead of naively wasting a medical school spot. Excluding poor working conditions for residents, hospital jobs are a mixed bag, especially for non-executives who aren’t eligible for bonuses, fancy offices, and expense accounts. Sometimes the time-off policy is pretty generous and layoffs are less frequent, but otherwise the rewards of hospital work mostly involve the satisfaction of helping people rather than helping yourself. It’s also not a given that people have a choice between the two worlds – hospitals hire lots of people who overestimate their own capabilities in failing to realize that nobody else would want them. My only conclusion is that medical schools should paint a realistic picture of what it’s like being a doctor before offering admission to a student who might have unreasonable expectations, but that’s not their business model — university tuition coffers are filled by students who are destined for a rude awakening when they realize that their expensive degree has little market value or has prepared them for a job nobody would really want.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Cerner and Epic share the lead as the companies for which poll respondents lost the most respect for in 2015. New poll to your right or here: what are your HIMSS conference plans?

I hope everyone enjoyed their most-of-December industry slowdown. The industry rocket is about to blast off now that New Year’s is behind us and HIMSS is just eight weeks away. News was understandably slow last week, so today’s post won’t consume too much of your first-day-back output.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• ProPublica launches a searchable database of health data breaches and privacy complaints.
• A new law takes effect that allows CMS to fine insurance companies for publishing incorrect provider databases.
• AMA President Steven Stack, MD names EHRs as the top cause of physician frustration.
• A New York non-profit rolls out an app that alerts volunteer first responders of nearby medical emergency 911 calls.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

South Carolina-based Singular Sleep offers $249 home-based sleep apnea studies and $69 online consultations for patients in 13 states.

The Chicago business paper profiles Prepared Health, which offers a care team communications platform. The company was started by folks formerly with Medicity.

People

Bruce Matter (AMC Health) joins Banyan Medical Systems as EVP of sales.

Other

In England, problems with the implementation of CSC/iSoft Lorenzo at Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust cause extended patient waitlists and short appointment time notices.

ProPublica covers Denmark’s 1992 elimination of medical malpractice lawsuits, replaced by a national compensation program in which patients file claims that are reviewed by independent experts who set compensation in return for gaining access to the details for ongoing improvement. The two most-used criteria there are: (a) was care of substantially lower quality than a specialist would have provided; or (b) did the patient experience a rare medical event, such as an unusual drug reaction. The average paid claim is $30,000, but citizens there file seven times the number of claims as in the US and four times more patients per capita receive awards. Doctors there are also legally required to tell patients when they’ve been harmed during medical care. The president of a US association of malpractice lawyers hates the idea, of course, fretting that “those with economically viable cases would take pennies on the dollar when their case is worth substantially more.” He left unstated the obvious two last words of the sentence that motivates him: “to me.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

News 12/30/15

Top News

ProPublica launches HIPAA Helper, which allows searching government data to see if a given provider or insurer was named in privacy complaints, breaches, or violations. The organization calls out frequent offenders , none of which have been assessed penalties by the Office for Civil Rights. 

Reader Comments

From The PACS Designer: “Re: fluorescent camera pills. As we get smaller technology in the form of camera pills, the innovations become exciting. Florescent technologies are now so small that they can be inserted into a swallowed form that includes a camera that can now detect cancer without using an endoscope. The sensor used is called the single photon avalanche detector (SPAD) and it can detect single light photons given off by the molecules in human tissue.”

From Dorm Fridge: “Re: saying ‘no problem.’ I say it to indicate that whatever I did wasn’t a burden. It makes just as much sense as ‘you’re welcome.’” “You’re welcome” indeed doesn’t make much sense (nor does “thank you,” for that matter – why not “I thank you?”) but at least it’s traditional. Just about everybody I’ve heard say “no problem” — or its even more annoying variant, “not a problem” — is under 30, so I certainly wouldn’t use the phrase when trying to sell something to curmudgeonly older executives. I’ve also noticed that younger folks have unnecessarily raised the gratitude gamesmanship by embracing “thank you SO MUCH,” oddly pronouncing the “so” more like “soul.” Here’s a compromise: expressions of gratitude don’t require a reply, especially the call-and-raise response of thanking that person back, so just let it ride unchallenged or give a slight smile or nod. It’s all weird, of course, just like saying “goodbye” or “bye,” which originated as a shortened version of “God be with you,” which technically a non-believer shouldn’t be saying. I’m also intrigued that non-Texans are using “howdy” for some reason.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

RIP Motorhead and Hawkwind singer Lemmy, who has died of cancer at 70.

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous donated $250 to my DonorsChoose project, which was matched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and then again by my anonymous vendor executive. That allowed me to fund $1,000 worth of teacher grant requests, all of which carried additional matching funds to stretch the donation value to fund $2,000 worth of projects:

• Three sets of ear buds and wireless mice for Mrs. Steele’s kindergarten class in Huntland, TN.
• Two programmable robots for Mr. Willet’s elementary school digital lab in Asheville, NC.
• Five MP3 players to form a listening center so that Ms. Johnson can read books for her first grade class in Oklahoma City, OK, in which the student poverty rate is 100 percent and 98 percent are English Language Learners.
• A Chromebook, case, six sets of headphones, and a wireless mouse for Ms. Johnson’s third grade class in Philadelphia, PA.
• An iPad Mini, Apple TV, case, and display adapter for Mrs. Robles’ middle school math class in Phoenix, AZ. She replied almost immediately, “Oh my God! Because of you, all my underprivileged students will be beaming with smiles and their brains full of knowledge that they will be eager to engage in and learn. It is because of wonderful people like you that our children have equal access to success and in becoming someone in this world! The kids have had to deal with the lack of the proper tools to learn. This will definitely be a game changer. They will not feel left out in the technological world and will be super proud to come and learn in my room. Over 150 students will now feel part of a new era of learning.”
• A laptop and Ethernet switch for a student-led project in which the West Covina, CA school’s robotic team will recruit new members by demonstrating their robots to fellow students and parents on Saturdays. As the students who made the request summarized, “This year, our robotics team won the 2015 Chezy Champs Competition and we are ready to win it again! Just like a football team, after high school seniors graduate, we have to rebuild the team. Without enough team players and support, we are at risk of losing our robotics program … With a new notebook and Ethernet switch, we will be able to showcase our previously built robots! We want to be able to show how exciting robotics is, and be able to present this without having any embarrassing hiccups.”

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I took a look at how publicly traded health IT-related stocks fared in 2015 from best to worst. For the year to date, the S&P 500 was up less than 1 percent, Nasdaq around 7.5 percent, and the Dow down less than 1 percent.

1. MedAssets: up 56 percent
2. Nuance: up 43 percent
3. Aetna: up 38 percent
4. Leidos: up 34 percent
5. Allscripts: up 21 percent
6. UnitedHealth Group: up 19 percent
7. Vocera: up 18 percent
8. Cognizant: up 17 percent
9. Athenahealth: up 13 percent
10. Teladoc: down 8 percent (since its June IPO)
11. Premier: up 4 percent
12. Quality Systems: up 4 percent
13. McKesson: down 3 percent
14. The Advisory Board Company: up 3 percent
15. Cerner: down 5 percent
16. Imprivata: down 14 percent
17. CPSI: down 17 percent
18. Evolent Health: down 34 percent (since its June IPO)
19. Castlight Health: down 64 percent
20. Streamline Health: down 68 percent

Government and Politics

A new law that goes into effect this week allows CMS to fine insurance companies whose provider directories contain mistakes that can cause patients to inadvertently receive out-of-network care. California fined Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California last month after discovering that 25 percent of the doctors in their directories either didn’t accept their insurance or had moved, while Blue Shield has paid $38 million to cover out-of-network bills that were caused by its inaccurate doctor listings. Critics say the provider directories are full of doctors who are dead, moved, retired, no longer accepting insurance, or not accepting new patients. Insurance companies say directory management is a nightmare since doctors often don’t return their calls and 30 percent of them change affiliations in a given year. CMS originally required insurance companies to call every doctor monthly to verify their listings, but changed that to quarterly since as MGMA says, “The last thing physicians want is for hundreds of health plans to call them every month.”

Privacy and Security

This won’t help the argument for a national patient identifier: the TSA may stop accepting driver’s licenses issued by several states that refuse to comply with federal standards. Federal law requires states to check documents that verify the identity of applicants, equip the license with a chip or magnetic stripe containing the information collected, and to share information with other states and the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security wants to implement the $3.9 billion program to more carefully check travelers and to prevent identity theft, while critics say it’s the equivalent of a national ID card and the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management raises concerns about storing too much personal information in one location.

Mainstream media have picked up on a Financial Times report that simply added up the number of hacked US medical record records for 2015 and reached the unsurprising total of 100 million, nearly 80 million of which resulted from the Anthem breach alone. FT repeats the hacker motivation in which a credit card record fetches only $1 on the black market, while a complete medical record is worth $2,000.

Technology

The first non-beta release of Google Glass will occur in mid-2016, says a newspaper that ran purportedly leaked photos of the device obtained from FCC filings. It will now be sold only to businesses under the name Google Glass Enterprise Edition, available only from companies that will pre-load their software on it. Features include a sturdier hinged design, an external battery pack, a larger screen but at least one model that won’t include a screen at all, and eventually a clip-on model for people who wear glasses. Excited Glassholes who paid $1,500 for the previous version – most of whom abandoned it quickly due to limited functionality and unlimited public scorn — probably aren’t thrilled that the Glass development team now refers to their premature technology investment as “little more than a scuba mask attached to a laptop.”

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists develop ProteinPaint, a free Web application and dataset that allows scientists to analyze and contribute information on genetic mutations that cause pediatric cancer.

Other

An interesting article questions the AMA’s interest in requiring competency testing for aging physicians. Some experts say evidence is scant that older doctors are less competent or less likely to follow modern standards and therefore any new competency testing should be applied to all doctors. This is a brilliant quote: “It’s a growing concern now that 26 percent of active physicians in the US — about a quarter million docs — are over 60. Fears they will soon go running for the exits and create a physician shortage are competing with fears that they will stick around forever and create a quality performance gap.”

In Pakistan, a government official angry at the IT department of a local hospital gives it until February 15 to go live with its computer system after the project was delayed for five years.

The $1,000 per pill hepatitis C drug Sovaldi costs only $4 in India after Gilead Sciences licenses 11 India-based companies to produce generic versions that aren’t available here. You’re welcome, India (or should that be “no problem?”) That nicely illustrates how product pricing that would be entirely reasonable in every other industry (charge whatever people are willing and able to pay) is infuriating when being an un-wealthy citizen of a purportedly wealthy (but deeply in debt) country means you can’t afford to get something that would make you healthier.

Researchers find that contrary to perception, Britons have better teeth than Americans, mostly because they have access to publicly funded medical and dental care and we don’t. We’re mid-pack in global dental health, which is a lot better than we fare in overall health in every category other than spending.

A senior manager at a company that specializes in “changing health behavior” (meaning being paid to push paid advertising at doctors) urges colleagues that “we must rely in EHR technology to capture data and use it to target our messages effectively … Our promotion can be just as successful as [wrestling promoter] WWE.” You can bet that sort of nonsense will neither raise physician EHR satisfaction nor lower US healthcare costs, but the fact is, it works, because doctors aren’t nearly as smart as they think in resisting the siren song of billion-dollar industries willing to do anything to wrest control of their prescribing pen or keyboard.

It’s puzzling to me why some experts – doctors, CIOs, and health IT people – seem to structure their entire professional lives around Twitter and Facebook as though whatever they do there constitutes a professional accomplishment worth including on their LinkedIn profile. As evidence, note the unconvincing “7 Social Media Platforms Every Urologist Should Use,” which suggests that “it’s becoming essential for every healthcare professional to cultivate an online presence” and adds that following lame conference tweets is as good as actually attending. The author says every urologist should use Facebook, LinkedIn, Doximity, Twitter, Figure1, Instagram, and Periscope. I think it’s probably an uncommon urologist whose social bleatings would prove entertaining or informative, so perhaps the blanket recommendation that all of them take to the airwaves should be tempered with the reality that not all of them are well suited for it. Self-proclaimed “King of the Urology Twitter World” Ben Davies, MD  (@daviesbj) is an obvious exception, although he shares stuff that patients might not need or want to see.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

20 Top Stories of 2015, 20 Predictions for 2016

It’s not too hard to choose 2015’s big stories, but I’m annoyed by people who make obvious “predictions” that are intentionally vague enough to evade accountability, like psychics who boldly proclaim that their client will have “a change in fortune” or “family developments, some good and some bad” in hoping desperately not to lose business by being proved clearly wrong. My predictions will be specific and I’ll publicly recap them this time next year even if they make me look silly.

What are your predictions for 2016? Send them my way and I’ll list them here.

Stories

1. The Department of Defense chooses the team of Leidos, Cerner, Accenture, and Henry Schein for its $4.3 billion EHR project.
2. High-flying Theranos and Turing Pharmaceuticals go down in flames, at least temporarily.
3. NantHealth continues its acquisition streak and PR push, but temporarily shelves its IPO plans.
4. ICD-10 finally goes live with barely a ripple thanks to the in-the-trenches folks who modified systems to accommodate it.
5. The Supreme Court upholds the Affordable Care Act, but poor-performing state exchanges, increased insurance company costs, and increasingly higher deductible and narrower networks leave the middle class footing the bill for a bold experiment that has mostly helped providers gain paying patients without improving overall health.
6. Just about everybody pushes back on Meaningful Use Stage 3, either by complaining to Congress or exiting the program, and doctors increasingly say their EHRs are the top source of their dissatisfaction.
7. Industry mergers increase dramatically at all levels – health systems, health IT vendors, drug companies, and insurance companies.
8. Epic CEO Judy Faulkner pledges to donate her multi-billion dollar fortune to a charitable foundation upon her death or direction.
9. Epic and Cerner continue to dominate the inpatient systems market at the expense of their only significant competitor, Meditech.
10. Data breaches become commonplace, including hackers who accessed the identities of 80 million people associated with Anthem.
11. Cerner completes its acquisition of the former Siemens Health Services, but sees its financial results tarnish slightly immediately following.
12. Athenahealth acquires software from RazorInsights and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as it increases its push into the inpatient market.
13. CVS and Walgreens continue to lead health IT with innovative apps and services.
14. Epic wins several impressive customers, but struggles in the UK, loses the DoD contract, and will be displaced with Cerner following Banner Health’s acquisition of financially strapped University of Arizona Health Network.
15. The OpenNotes project to allow patients to review clinician documentation gains ground with positive study findings and new funding.
16. Expectations increase for the FHIR standard as the best way to integrate EHR information with other systems.
17. ONC releases its Interoperability Roadmap that calls for EHR vendors to expand their API support and for the government to streamline privacy and security policies.
18. Mobile apps show considerable promise for diagnosing and monitoring mental health conditions, especially depression.
19. Apple announces ResearchKit for clinical study enrollment.
20. Major healthcare systems and payers pledge to migrate most of their business to value-based payments by 2020.

Predictions

1. The cooled-off IPO and funding markets will leave nearly all of the unprofitable startups that graduated from the overabundance of accelerators and incubators in the past few years struggling to gain or maintain momentum and customers. Companies with IPO intentions will postpone their plans due to market conditions, but Health Catalyst will do so anyway with decent but comparatively unspectacular initial share price results as wary investors wait for a couple of good quarters to convince them.
2. Healthcare costs will become a contentious topic in the 2016 presidential elections as the millions of Americans who purchased health insurance are stung by low utilization and high costs due to high deductibles and co-insurance, leaving them both poorer and less healthy than before. Medical bankruptcies will increase significantly and hospitals in particular will find it difficult to collect the money owed by under-insured patients. At least one presidential candidate will timidly suggest cost controls – both provider and pharma – as the only remaining option in trying to manage the increasingly damaging costs of healthcare in the US. Provider mergers will continue and national brands such as Kaiser Permanente that combine insurance and care delivery will gain prominence.
3. Consumers will lose interest in fitness trackers and wearables as 2015’s Christmas presents gather January dust just like they did last year.
4. The CEOs of Epic, Cerner, and Meditech will start to pull back from day-to-day company involvement as they approach retirement.
5. ONC and Meaningful Use will become increasingly less relevant and more contested as ONC replaces Karen DeSalvo with a new National Coordinator who lacks her experience and bipartisan support.
6. Several mid-tier consulting firms will be downsized or acquired as their implementation and advisory business dries up.
7. At least three big health systems will experience a data breach that results in exposure of the information of 100,000 or more their patients. The industry will realize that collaboration to identify and mitigate breach threats is essential and of mutual benefit. The government and organizations such as HIMSS will attempt to create and manage an information sharing and risk assessment platform.
8. The VA will announce plans to eventually replace VistA with a commercial product. Congress will push Cerner since the Department of Defense will be implementing it, but the VA will favor Epic just to be different.
9. At least one Epic and Cerner customer will switch to the other company’s product in trying to get a better deal on crippling software maintenance fees. Epic will also expand its hosting service to compete with Cerner’s successful offering.
10. The terms “telemedicine” and “mobile health” will become antiquated as they simply become another accepted aspect of care delivery. “Information blocking” will also fade away as a hot term when everybody realizes the concept involves speculation without proof, but consumers will increasingly demand that their providers share their information – both with their other providers and with themselves – without charging per-page fees for information that exists in electronic form.
11. IBM Watson will continue to produce mostly hype. No convincing studies will demonstrate its value, but newly announced, high-profile partnerships will keep IBM shareholders hopeful.
12. The dark horse publicly traded company best positioned to succeed in health IT and related areas without a lot of fanfare will be Premier.
13. Athenahealth won’t get much inpatient traction with the former RazorInsights and BIDMC’s WebOMR.
14. McKesson will consider packaging and divesting its many health IT offerings as non-core business.
15. Epic will not join CommonWell, but will leapfrog its competitors in offering APIs and slowly building a carefully controlled third-party ecosystem.
16. Software for population health management and analytics will enter Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment as providers implement it poorly and without a commitment to truly change their profitable business models.
17. Cerner and Epic will continue to poach the business of Meditech, CPSI, and best-of-breed vendors whose small-hospital customer bases are being acquired by larger health systems.
18. “Big data” will support a few meaningful clinical studies performed using only aggregated electronic information, but “little data” will provide more impressive but less-publicized results as doctors design the treatments of individual patients by reviewing the outcomes of similar patients.
19. Consumer healthcare apps will continue to be plagued by inconsistent use, questionable design, and an unremarkable impact on health or outcomes.
20. CHIME and AMIA will follow the HIMSS model of increasing conference attendance and revenue by catering to high-paying vendors willing to buy access to prospects.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

Monday Morning Update 12/28/15

Top News

AMA President Steven Stack, MD says EHRs are the #1 frustration of doctors, explaining,

We live in a world where a 2- or 3-year-old can pick up a smartphone and use it with no instructions. If you’re not careful, they’ll order from Amazon and have something delivered to your house two days later. But we have graduate-educated physicians who are being forced to use software that looks like it’s on an old-fashioned, DOS-based system, a Tandy, an Atari, the kind of software you can only see in a museum. And that’s the software we’ve been given to manage patients’ health and well-being. So you have physicians whose efficiency is decimated. Their ability to communicate with each other is completely crippled. And then they’re told you’re not doing a good job.

Reader Comments

From Coal-Bearing Santa: “Re: Marshfield Clinic. I’ve heard that CareCloud has made a deal for its Cattails system and will white label it as an additional CareCloud product.” I forgot that the organizations announced a deal in April 2015 to sell software and services to large physician groups.

From Frisbee Golfer: “Re: Claritas Mindsciences. The three-person firm (everybody is a consultant), which makes the Craving to Quit app, has asked consultants to work for half their normal rates and is struggling to pay vendors after they failed to raise funds for operations in December.” Unverified. Their executive page still lists four people, but what drew my attention is that the company spelled its own name incorrectly on the exec page and sometimes uses “Mindscience” instead of “Mindsciences.”

From John: “Re: NHS. They have the top Christmas song!” In England, the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir beats out Justin Bieber for the top Christmas song. Bieber encouraged his Twitter followers to buy the record instead of his own, which sent it to the top of the sales chart. Proceeds will be donated to charities.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Three-fourths of poll respondents say they had at least as good a year in 2015 as they did in 2014. Pablo says he left the health IT staffing market because business is dying due to EHR vendors expanding their own internal consulting teams, a saturated and commoditized market, and staffing companies that failed to transition into advisory services.

New poll to your right or here: which company did you lose the most respect for in 2015? Vote and then click the poll’s Comment link to explain.

I’ll be closing my reader survey shortly, so you’ll have done your good deed for the next year if you take two minutes to complete it. I’m already contemplating one change as suggested by a reader who would like to see more in-depth reporting in particular areas.

My latest pet peeves: (a) people who say, “I get that” in subtly but indignantly correcting someone who they perceive believes otherwise;  (b) those folks, mostly younger, who respond to a thank you with, “No problem,” thereby devaluing the act that triggered my gratitude by suggesting it wasn’t much effort for them; and (c) Facebook users who excitedly “like” obviously phony stories without bothering to check Snopes.com first, like photos of the Egyptian pyramids covered by snow after a freak storm.

We funded four tablets for three pre-K classrooms in New York via DonorsChoose. Mrs. Martin says many of her students had never seen a tablet. They watch videos on them, trace on-screen letters with their fingers to learn to write, and play educational games. That’s a pretty strong ROI for tablets that cost only $41 each.

An anonymous donor sent $500 for my DonorsChoose project, which was matched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a one-day funding special and then the $1,000 total was matched again by my anonymous vendor executive, allowing me to fund these projects (some of these had additional matching funds applied as well):

• 10 sets of headphones for Mr. Ohlinger’s middle school science class, Canton, OH
• A Bluetooth robotic arm, a solar powered robot, and a BoeBot robot kit to create a robotics team at Ms. Sobosan’s high school in Las Vegas, NV
• 15 scientific calculators for Mr. Cho’s Bureau of Indian Affairs high school class in Lower Brule, SD
• Math story books for Ms. Livingston’s third grade class in Las Cruces, NM
• Headphones, whiteboards, privacy partitions, and paper supplies for Mrs. Heinrich’s elementary school class in San Jose, CA
• Three tablets for Ms. W’s second grade class in Oakland, CA

Anonymous Epic QA donated $100, with multiplied into $400 due to Gates Foundation and my vendor exec matching money to buy these items:

• Engineering toys and team building sets for Ms. Medina’s first grade class in Los Angeles, CA
• 25 sets of headphones for Mrs. Riley’s second grade class in Baltimore, MD
• An iPad Mini for Mrs. Ulhaque’s first grade class in Houston, TX

I had a little bit of extra money in the account, so I decided to buy a Chromebook, wireless printer, and supplies for Mrs. Hamilton’s fourth grade class in Carson, CA. I also realized that when I announced that donations had funded $22,000 worth of projects in 2015 that I was off considerably – all of the recent donations were via gift cards and those show on the donor’s totals, not mine. The actual total is a lot higher and even that doesn’t take into account matching funds from foundations.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• The Department of Defense expands the scope of the DHMSM project in giving Leidos/Cerner a no-bid hosting contract, saying Cerner’s systems won’t work properly unless the company hosts them itself.
• Medicare releases a dashboard showing its drug-specific spending.
• Martin Shkreli is arrested on securities fraud charges and fired as CEO of the two drug companies in which he holds substantial ownership.
• Congress passes a blanket Meaningful Use hardship exemption.
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center announces that it will replace McKesson’s Horizon Expert Orders, which VUMC originally developed as WizOrder, with Epic.

Webinars

None in the next few days. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A watchdog’s report finds that McKesson paid the most money in misconduct penalties of all Department of Defense contractors since 1995. McKesson paid $2.05 billion in penalties for 24 instances of misconduct while earning $6.2 billion of the Pentagon’s business.

The Greenville, SC paper profiles local personal health records startup ChartSpan, which says it will grow from 20 employees to more than 200 within the next two years.

People

Eric Alper (Lifespan) is named VP/chief clinical informatics officer at UMass Memorial Health Care.

Firelands Regional Medical Center (OH) promotes Denao Ruttino to AVP of operations.

Other

New York-based non-profit United Rescue is spending $2 million to train and equip volunteer first responders in Jersey City, NJ who will be notified via a smartphone app when someone nearby calls 911 with a medical emergency, allowing them to render aid to the victim before paramedics arrive. The program is modeled after one in Israel where 3,000 volunteers respond to 700 emergencies each day for a program cost of $7 million per year.

Impact Advisors sent over photos from their holiday employee gatherings across the country, including this one from Chicago.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

News 12/23/15

Top News

ONC releases its 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory that lists federally recognized interoperability standards and guidance.

Reader Comments

From Ambient Occlusion: “Re: homegrown EHRs. Regenstrief/Eskanazi signed up for Epic earlier this year.” Somehow I was thinking Marshfield Clinic and my fingers typed Regenstrief instead when I was trying to think of the last few health systems that are using homegrown EHRs (BIDMC is the other) now that Vanderbilt is moving away from WizOrder/Horizon Expert Orders in favor of Epic. I replied as such to Ambient Occlusion, who then pondered what Marshfield will do after pumping so much money into Cattails. He added a theory that they’ve probably capitalized some of their software development costs and would therefore not only need to spend big money to replace their self-developed product, but even more to write down whatever of its depreciated costs that remain on the books. Marshfield has tried to commercialize Cattails, but given that the newest press release on their site is from 2010, I’m guessing it’s not burning up the EHR charts.

From Benign Growth: “Re: HIStalk. I’m new here and I can’t figure out who’s writing what.” That’s easy – every word you read in an HIStalk news post is mine (Mr. HIStalk, aka Mr. H) unless I’m taking a rare day off and Jenn is covering for me. It always amuses me when people refer to the HIStalk “team” as through there’s a bunch of us working full time in an office. I write HIStalk, Jenn writes HIStalk Practice, Lt. Dan writes the HIStalk headlines and HIStalk Connect, and Lorre handles the webinars and sponsor activities. We each do our own thing with minimal contact with each other since we’re spread out and don’t need much supervision. Our past and present day jobs didn’t often support the creativity and fun we enjoy here. It will be 13 years in June since I started HIStalk and I still can’t wait to start filling the blank page every day.

From Rough Taxpayer Sex: “Re: DHMSM. SPAWAR has added a sole-source hosting agreement to Leidos/Cerner. This looks like a total scam. Either they lied in the RFP about what they could provide or they’re lying now.” DoD awards Leidos a no-bid Cerner hosting contract that it claims won’t cost more than $5 million per year, explaining the need to modify the scope of the $4.3 billion award as follows below. Note that it’s nobody’s fault according to the wording – Leidos didn’t suggest that service and the government people involved could not have anticipated the need for it (I expect this excuse to be re-used for future expensive scope changes):

While Leidos solution meets the contract requirements, many of the capabilities of the DHMSM EHR cannot be fully realized unless they are hosted in the Cerner environment. In order to fully enable these functionalities, the DHMSM EHR requires direct access to proprietary Cerner data, which is only available within Cerner-owned and operated data centers. The proprietary data consists of quantitative models and strategies which are the result of extensive Cerner-funded research and development efforts conducted over 15 years. The models are based on analysis of clinical, operational, and financial data associated and incorporate vast amounts of actual longitudinal patient data and information collected through other Cerner applications. Forward deploying the DHMSM EHR into any other hosting solution would prevent access to these models and data. Significant functionality exists within the required system that utilizes machine learning and computational statistics to enable predictive analysis and decision support that directly impact patient outcomes. Therefore, no other contractor can satisfy the requirement. Prior to awarding this performance-based contract, the Government could not have anticipated this solution-specific need, which is why this scope was not included in the original RFP.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I use the responses from my once-yearly reader survey figure out what I’m doing well and not so well. I would appreciate two minutes of your time to complete it. That will also place you in the running as the randomly chosen recipient of a $50 Amazon gift card. I used previous survey results to make changes that became into some of the most important attributes of HIStalk, so your time will not be wasted. I get a lot of great ideas from the survey, although I have to be careful not to: (a) fix something that isn’t broken; (b) do something that isn’t true to my personality or passions; (c) take on more work than I can handle effectively; or (d) do something that would make writing HIStalk less fun so that I would be tempted to quit doing it.

An anonymous Epic developer donated $200 for my DonorsChoose project, to which I applied matching funds from my anonymous vendor executive as well as from private foundations to purchase these items:

• Fraction, decimal, and percent learning tools for Mrs. Sutton’s third grade class in Herrin, IL
• A Chromebook for Ms. Marlowe’s kindergarten class in Charlotte, NC
• Math games and learning materials for Ms. Osborne’s elementary school class in Columbia, SC
• Math games and a learning center rug for Mrs. Begg’s middle school class of learning and emotionally disabled students in Baltimore, MD

Ms. Osborn’s Florida second graders, many of whom are children of immigrants and frequently-moving military families, are working in teams using the STEM materials we provided via DonorsChoose to solve real-world engineering problems.

Also checking in is Ms. C from South Carolina, who teaches a class of severely intellectually disabled seventh and eighth graders for whom our DonorsChoose donation provided a library of around 100 high-interest, low-readability books. She provides background on the student in the photo above as an example: “The picture of the boy reading a book with my Dr. Seuss hat on is a child from a low-income family. He will come to school hungry and is usually very sleepy because he can’t sleep at night. He is very capable of reading better than he does right now. He loves to go over to my little classroom library and pick out a book to read. The other day he told us that he is actually leaning something this year. Until this project was funded, I really didn’t have enough books for a classroom library, but now I do.”

It’s that time of year where we’ve now gotten past the shortest day (December 21) and spring and the HIMSS conference aren’t far away. I’ll probably take this Friday and next off since I doubt many folks will be reading on Christmas and New Year’s eve and day. I expected to be mostly loafing around for most of December since it’s usually slow, but I’ve been pretty busy with fresh news and lots of companies are signing up as HIStalk and HIStalkapalooza sponsors. It’s good to keep busy, for which I thank every person who reads HIStalk and every company that supports it.

Thanks to the following sponsors, new and renewing, that have recently support HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect. Click a link for more information.

Webinars

None in the next few days. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Invoice Cloud acquires Imagevision.net, which offers the HealthPay24 point-of-service payment product used by 100 hospitals.

The professional regulator in England bars two former finance directors of one-time NHS software supplier iSoft (now owned by CSC) from practicing accounting for eight years for their involvement in the company’s financial irregularities nearly 10 years ago. Four company executives were acquitted in 2013 of securities charges.

Sales

Northern Arizona Healthcare chooses Cerner Business Office Services for its ambulatory clinics and ACO, apparently replacing Athenahealth.

Announcements and Implementations

Summit Healthcare releases a Cerner-specific version of its domain compare-and-sync platform that supports data extraction, analysis, regression, and testing.

Halifax Health (FL) goes live with Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor for real-time, data-driven sepsis alerts and advice.

Government and Politics

CMS releases the Medicare Drug Spending Dashboard that includes the top 15 drugs by overall annual cost and per Medicare user as well as the drugs whose price jumped the most in 2014. The $1,000 per tablet hepatitis C drug Sovaldi topped the list as Medicare spent $3.1 billion on it at an average per-patient cost of $94,000. The most expensive drug per patient was Remodulin, used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension, which cost an average of $134,000 per patient per year. You will recall that the Affordable Care Act prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, a carrot added by the White House to appease drug companies who otherwise would have used their political clout to kill its administration-defining initiative.

Kansas state auditors say the state’s delayed Medicaid system rollout was due to unrealistic timelines and unmet functionality promises from contractor Accenture. Federal taxpayers are footing most of the cost of the Accenture contract that is worth $135 million upfront and $50 million for ongoing maintenance. Auditors predict that the project will run $46 million over budget, with nearly all of that bill also being passed along to federal taxpayers.

CMS is investigating complaints filed by two former Theranos employees who claim that the lab company instructed its employees to continue using its proprietary testing technology despite “major stability, precision, and accuracy” problems. The former employees said results varied widely and that quality control checks of the testing method often failed. Theranos says the former employees are just disgruntled. The company continues to claim that it will publish peer-reviewed data proving its claims, but says they aren’t yet ready.

Other

Baseball data analysis expert and Harvard-trained statistician Paul DePodesta, played as a composite character by Jonah Hill in the movie “Moneyball,” joins Scripps Translational Science Institute in a part-time, unspecified role. He says in an interview conducted by his new co-worker Eric Topol, MD:

If there’s a player who has been in the Major League for say five years, we have an awful lot of data on that player. So when we’re making a decision on that player, we may largely be using data to make that decision. Go to the total opposite end of the spectrum – a 15 year old playing in Maracaibo, Venezuela – we don’t have a whole lot of data on him. We have some, what I would call sort of outside data. We know about players form that area, we know players of his size, his strength, his age, his position. Not necessarily specific things about him, but we can create general conceptions about what that player could be expected to do based on all these other players have done who are similar to him in same fashion … people are trying to get their arms around uncertainty and trying to make better decisions for the future and realizing that data can really help them do that. Whether it’s financial services or trucking or farming, I mean there are all sorts of different industries that I never even dreamed of back when the book first came out and even when the movie came out that have reached out to us — to me or to Billy or to others — and have said, “We’re doing this now and it’s really helping — do you have other ideas about what we might be able to do?

Speaking of “Moneyball,” I’ll say again that of the many conference speakers I’ve seen, the best was Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics. If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s a recap. Beane’s team didn’t have the money to sign or retain big-name players who made occasional crowd-pleasing plays yet failed to achieve consistency, so he measured and analyzed available player performance data to choose lesser-known and therefore less-expensive players who produced consistent but unspectacular results, like getting on base a high percentage of the time, and then managed using those specific strengths to produce team wins. I thought it was bizarre that Health Catalyst chose Beane as a keynote speaker for its first Healthcare Analytics Summit in the fall of 2014 until I heard him.

A USC report predicts that Medicare spending will double to $1.2 trillion by 2030 as per-beneficiary costs rise 50 percent, caused by aging baby boomers who — much more than in previous generations — are overweight, disabled, and suffering from chronic conditions. In other words, people who might have died from now-preventable heart disease will live longer and more expensively in requiring treatment of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

CMS identifies at least five drugs whose cost doubled in 2014 from the new Medicare Drug Spending Dashboard that I mentioned above, with the ridiculously unoriginal Vimovo (two old generic drugs combined, naproxen and esomeprazole, the first for pain and the second to reduce side effects caused by the first) leading the list after a new company bought the drug and raised its price 500 percent. Ancient drugs captopril and digoxin were among the leaders, which cries out for some sort of action to stop companies from buying the rights to old drugs and then jacking up their prices to yield pure profit without the inconvenience of performing research studies or creating something new that might benefit patients rather than shareholders.

I also note that Vimovo maker Horizon Pharma is using a now-common drug company trick to increase patient demand while raising societal costs overall – its “support card” promises that patients will pay little or nothing as co-pays even while the company is sticking their insurance company for the inflated cost. Medicare spent $39 million on this lame drug in 2014, which of course means doctors prescribed it quite a bit for reasons that probably aren’t entirely rational.

It hasn’t been a great week for Martin Shkreli, who in addition to being arrested on securities fraud charges and then fired as CEO of Turing Pharmaceticals, has now been fired as CEO and board member of KaloBios, the drug company he bought just a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, Shkreli tells the Wall Street Journal that the government trumped up securities charges in desperately trying to find something to arrest him for. He also claims that his over-the-top behavior is “a social experiment” that makes him an undeserving target. He would make an ideal HIStalk interview, although I’m not holding my breath.

This image has been used so many times without attribution that I can’t tell where it came from, but I saw it on LinkedIn and liked it.

Gallup’s annual poll of most honest and ethical professions finds nurses, pharmacists, and physicians taking the top three spots. The last-place finishers are members of Congress, telemarketers, and lobbyists.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Start with Why (Iatric Systems)
• Unified Care Teams Need a Unified Communications Strategy (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Information Management #2 – Bad Data (Clinical Architecture)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

Monday Morning Update 12/21/15

Top News

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will implement Epic, replacing the sunsetted McKesson Horizon Expert Orders. VUMC developed WizOrder and sold it to McKesson in 2001, which commercialized it as HEO. VUMC announced in April 2015 that it would choose between Epic and Cerner. It says none of the functionality it self-developed in WizOrder will be lost. I can’t think of any other homegrown systems still in use other than at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and perhaps at Regenstrief.

Reader Comments

From Below the Beltway: “Re: Meaningful Use. A blanket hardship exemption was not included in either the omnibus or the extenders package passed and the matter seemed settled for this year. Surprisingly, the Legislature came to an agreement on a bill with several Medicare reforms, including a change to the hardship exemption on a bill with several other Medicare reforms. The bill, S. 2425, passed the Senate Friday morning and the House Friday afternoon by voice vote and unanimous consent, respectively.” The full text of the bill is here.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: EDWs. TPD isn’t a vendor neutral archive advocate. More VNAs only complicate the storage issues and can result in arguments about what can be put in a VNA. A better idea is the electronic data warehouse (EDW), which encompasses not only using internal data sources, but also can include external ones and can bring more value to the decision-making processes. EDWs are also a better way to communicate with an HIE. What do you think?”

From Spiffy Tie: “Re: Cerner. My organization is a Cerner client and my perception of the company has fluctuated widely over the past 10 years. I’ve been especially disgusted by Cerner’s business plan. Their software has improved in many respects, but to make it functional requires a lot of customization. Cerner will gladly sell consulting time to multiple organizations to make the same changes rather than building it into the base product. Issues that would be bugs or defects in other software is typically said to be WAD (working as designed). If you want it fixed, you can pay for the customization yourself or submit an ‘idea,’ which is almost always rejected as ‘not aligned with current priorities.’ Other new features that are essential (to correct prior defects, safety issues, or gaps in content) are incorporated into new packages that have to be purchased separately rather than being a part of already-purchased upgrades. Despite my disgust with Cerner’s overall approach, I also have very positive feelings about Cerner in terms of their employees. Virtually everyone I’ve worked with is knowledgeable, professional, and willing to go the extra mile to make things work for our staff and our patients. I have very high regard for them and enjoy working with them very much. I think it’s especially egregious that Cerner would turn on its best asset, their employees, with this forced arbitration clause. If other companies and our judicial system have engaged in or supported such abusive extortion of hard-working individuals, then shame on them too.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The vast majority of poll respondents see Cerner’s requirement that employees sign arbitration clauses to continue eligibility for merit increases as negative. Some readers say it’s not just Cerner doing it and perhaps adding the $500 in stock options as a legal “consideration” was required to make the unilateral contract change legal. Several respondents predict that the company will lose good employees who will resent the strong-arm tactics and whose talent gives them career options elsewhere. New poll to your right or here: how was your 2015 compared to 2014? Click the Comments link after voting and explain why.

Readers always enjoy the HCIT Family Tree that shows the acquisition history of all the health IT vendors. Creator Constantine Davides, senior healthcare analyst with AlphaOne Capital Partners, has updated it. Here’s a trivia question I randomly chose from Constantine’s chart: which company owns the former Medifor?

I’ve been using a third-party Rumor Report form for years, never quite getting around to making the easy switch to the form design tool I already own that would have saved me $20 per year. The choice was made for me, which you may have noticed if you tried to use the form recently – the tiny company that hosted it lost their server and didn’t have a backup, so they shut the service down without letting users know. Try the new form instead.

My latest pet peeve: software companies that claim to be “population health management” vendors instead of “population health management software” vendors.

Mrs. Schmidt’s California fourth graders can’t wait to start using the STEM lab kits and library we provided via her DonorsChoose grant request. Also checking in was Mrs. Marler of Alabama, whose third graders are using their new wireless document camera to explain their thought process to the class.

Not much will be happening over the next couple of weeks, so I’ll have less to write about. Then it will get crazy as it always does between New Year’s Day and the HIMSS conference, a frantic 10 weeks.

It’s time for my annual reader survey. Take a couple of minutes to fill it out and you’ll be: (a) helping me, and (b) entering yourself into a random drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Cerner requires its employees to sign away their rights to sue the company in return for remaining eligible for merit increases.
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation releases a dataset containing details of all marketplace-offered insurance plans for 2015 and 2015.
• CMS gives doctor selection website Amino access to provider-level quality and cost data.
• Five foundations donate $10 million to the OpenNotes initiative.
• National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH calls for health IT stakeholders to commit to providing consumer access, avoiding information blocking, and following standards
• Dell is again rumored to be trying to sell the former Perot Systems for $5 billion to help pay for its EMC acquisition.

Webinars

None in the next few days. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel

Here’s the video of Wednesday’s webinar, “A Sepsis Solution: Reducing Mortality by 50 Percent Using Advanced Decision Support,” sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Health and featuring guest presenter Rick Corn, VP/CIO of Huntsville Hospital (AL).

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Columbus, OH-based Aver, which offers software that allows providers to calculate bundled prices based on past claims, raises $11 million, increasing its total to $22 million.

New York’s Capital Region loses its bid for $500 million in state money that would have supported an investment of $100 million to $200 million to create a population health technology hub, but IBM Watson Health and other participants say they will continue their efforts without the state funds.

Sales

China-based Luye Medical Group chooses the InterSystems TrakCare EMR.

University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust chooses Hyland OnBase for enterprise content management.

Other

Pharma bad boy Martin Shkreli, who was arrested Thursday on securities fraud charges and then resigned (or was fired) as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals on Friday, spent Friday just like any other day: vainly live-streaming himself on YouTube as he exchanged messages with fans and critics, played his electric guitar, looked for women on dating sites, and played online chess. Magazines such as Vanity Fair are digging deeper beyond his cartoonish villain personality to acknowledge his brilliance, bluntness, and seldom-mentioned charitable side. Meanwhile, shares in biotech company KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which Shkreli acquired a few weeks back via shrewd Wall Street betting, were halted on the news of his arrest, having shed half their value in pre-market trading. They had jumped from under $1.00 per share to as high as $40 after Shkreli’s involvement was revealed, all in less than four weeks. His stake in the company, once worth $80 million, is now valued at around $50 million, at least until trading resumes. He is apparently still serving as CEO of KaloBios. A UCSF medical school professor and author reminds those who expressed glee at seeing Shkreli perp walked that his infamous Daraprim price hike wasn’t illegal and in fact still stands:

It easy to demonize him. But if you’re going to let the market drive the pharmaceutical industry, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he wants to maximize profits. There’s no law that he has to be ethical. His job is not to make drugs available and save patients. His responsibility is to make a profit for his shareholders.

Colorado puts single-payer coverage on the ballot, where the state would pay the medical bills of all citizens not covered by Medicare or military programs. Wage earners would pay 3 percent of their net income with their employers kicking in another 7 percent, with the new taxes covering the program’s estimated cost of $25 billion per year. Critics point out that Vermont already abandoned a similar plan because the state couldn’t afford it.

A California nursing home with a history of quality problems stops the IV antibiotic of a patient transferred from a local hospital after three days instead of the ordered four weeks due to a nurse’s order entry error.

France tackles anorexia head on by requiring models to obtain a doctor’s certification that their weight is healthy. The new law also requires magazines to clearly indicate when photos of a model have been Photoshopped to suggest a larger or smaller waistline, with fines of up to $40,000 for failing to do so.

Sponsor Updates

• Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager earns the highest preliminary rating scores in the KLAS population health management technology report.
• KLAS names Wellcentive among its top five population health management platform vendors.

Blog Posts

• As We Celebrate This Season (TeleTracking)
• 10 Tips for Choosing the Right RTLS for Your Hospital (Versus Technology)
• Happy holidays! (Voalte)
• Imaging Clinical Decision Support (Zynx Health)
• 5 questions with Nordic CEO Bruce Cerullo (Nordic)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

News 12/18/15

Top News

ONC’s Health IT Policy Committee issues its congressionally-mandated interoperability report that includes these recommendations:

• Create outcomes measures that reward well-coordinated and affordable care, such as not paying for performing duplicate lab tests.
• Publish EHR vendor interoperability scores based on actual customer use.
• Add Medicare payment incentives for technology-driven care coordination.
• Convene a summit meeting to start the operationalization of ONC’s Interoperability Roadmap and the recommendations in the document.

Reader Comments

From Fair and Balanced: “Re: Epic. Our support rep has been asking questions about one of our projects, saying Epic recently started an intra-company contest for writing news stories about positive client developments. She and I both speculate that Epic is looking for stories to feed to actual media outlets. If that’s the case, I’m uneasy that Epic is going to this length to promote itself in relying on its own employees for good news rather than for it to come about via independent parties noticing it.” Unverified. I’m not sure I would find that practice objectionable other than it seems to violate Epic’s unconvincing insistence that it doesn’t practice sales and marketing. Industry magazines and sites will cover anything that a vendor or provider hands them on a silver platter regardless of news value, but it’s a tougher sell to newspapers. I was once approached by the local big-city newspaper about a story that their highly visible technology reporter was writing about mobile devices. As I was taking him around to interview people at our hospital, I was surprised at how clueless and generally weird he was (he carried what looked like a purse and stopped every five minutes to squirt drops into his eyes, plus he didn’t seem to know much about technology). The resulting piece was superficial and not insightful since he simply regurgitated selective quotes from our folks, which is probably why I’m disdainful of former reporters who proclaim themselves health IT experts simply because they’ve spent a few years working at that superficial level.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week on HIStalk Practice: AMA opens up its Physician Innovation Network to beta testers. Connecticut physicians detail their telemedicine challenges. Wisconsin joins the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. Clinicians don’t seem convinced when it comes to HIE ROI. Stericycle VP Lyn Triffletti offers physicians tips to get a handle on HIPAA. Kaiser Permanente Northwest offers members urgent care video visits. Telemedicine keeps operations running smoothly at the North Pole. Dr. Gregg describes his user experience of e-prescribing in the dark.

This week on HIStalk Connect: Rock Health publishes its annual VC funding report which says that digital health startups raised $4.3 billion in investment capital this year, matching 2014’s total. Google partners with Johnson & Johnson to launch a new surgical robot solutions business. Medtronic partners with Samsung to develop smartphone apps for patients receiving neuromodulation therapy. Four foundations invest $10 million to fund the expansion of the OpenNotes program nationally, with a goal of reaching 50 million patients within the next three years.

Listening: Intronaut, LA-based jazzy progressive rock whose sound ranges from a jamming Alice in Chains to a heavier Tool. Also, one of my favorite bands, Zip Tang, masters of complex progressive rock now evolved to a power trio with the departure of the amazing Marcus Padgett (saxophone, keyboards, vocals, and most relevant to health IT, SVP of Experian Health).

Webinars

None in the next few days. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Insurance company/PPO Clover Health, which analyzes insurance claims to target high-risk patients with specific care manager interventions, raises $35 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, increasing its total to $135 million.

Data-driven physician performance website MD Insider raises $12 million, increasing its total to $24 million. The round was led by Summation Health Ventures, an investment fund started by Cedars-Sinai and MemorialCare Health Systems, with Cedars-Sinai CIO Darren Dworkin joining the company’s board.

California startup Kumba Health launches a marketplace for consumers willing to pay cash to choose physicians, labs, and imaging centers.

Oration, which offers prescription buying tools for the employees of large, self-insured companies, releases its first app and announces $11.2 million in Series A funding.

Toronto-based customer management software vendor NexJ Systems spins off its population health management software business into a new company, NexJ Health Holdings.

WellDoc, which offers a prescription-only diabetes management app, raises $22 million in Series B funding, increasing its total to $27 million.

Cerner says 93 percent of its 17,000 US employees have  signed away their right to sue the company in return for $500 in stock options and ongoing eligibility for merit increases. An expert says it’s the only example he’s seen where a company will limit future merit increases to employees who decline to sign its arbitration clause.

Sales

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust chooses Allscripts Sunrise.

The VA contracts with Cogito Corporation, which sells voice guidance technology for telephone salespeople, for software that can assess the mental health of participating veterans by analyzing their telephone conversations.

People

Paul Kleeberg,MD (Stratis Health) joins Aledade as medical director. He served on the HIMSS board from 2011 through 2015 and was its chair through June 2015.

Practice Fusion hires Steve Filler (Oliver Wyman) as COO and promotes Octavia Petrovici to SVP of product management.

Dan Orenstein (Athenahealth) joins Health Catalyst as general counsel.

Divurgent promotes Shane Danaher to national partner of client services.

Announcements and Implementations

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation releases a dataset of all insurance plans offered on health insurance marketplaces in 2015 and 2016, supporting state-by-state analysis of premiums, deductibles, and other plan attributes. For example, the dataset shows that prices increased an average of 10 percent for all tiers in 2016, while silver plans in Alaska saw the largest jump at 35 percent to an average premium of $643.

LauraLynn, Ireland’s children’s hospice, goes live on Oneview Healthcare’s patient engagement solutions in providing entertainment for patients and bedside access to clinical applications for clinicians.

Health information service provider MedAllies will use IBM-owned Merge Healthcare’s iConnect Network Services for image ordering and results delivery for its members. 

Columbus, OH-based CrossChx launches its Queue fingerprint-based check-in kiosk for hospitals that it says reduces wait times by 80 percent. The company says it links a fingerprint to hospital EHR data to provide interoperability when its customers check in somewhere else. Founder and CEO Sean Lane is a former Air Force intelligence officer and NSA fellow who served five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq before founding Battlefield Telecommunications Systems.

Government and Politics

CMS names Amino as its second national Qualified Entity, giving the doctor selection website access to Medicare’s provider-level quality and cost data. Amino has raised $20 million in three funding rounds.

HHS says few states have accepted available federal money to support data-driven Medicaid fraud detection even as improper payments have nearly doubled to 10 percent. The states that were contacted by Modern Healthcare gave several reasons: they have their own data mining efforts, they are trying to figure out if it would help, or they’re waiting to see what other states do before jumping in.

Privacy and Security

LifeLock will pay $100 million to settle FTC charges that it overstated its data protection capabilities and engaged in deceptive advertising.

Innovation and Research

Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center release a free app that uses Apple’s ResearchKit to track the symptoms of concussion patients.

Other

Madison magazine reviews the impact of Epic on Wisconsin, observing that it attracts huge numbers of liberal arts degreed young professionals who often leave the company after a few years but remain in the Madison area, giving Wisconsin an enviable population of high-achieving Millennials.

Turing Pharmaceutics CEO Martin Shkreli, the most-hated man on the Internet for hiking the price of old but important drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent after acquiring it, is arrested by federal agents and charged with securities fraud. Prosecutors claim Shkreli played a Ponzi-like financial shell game while with Retrophin, a drug company he started before Turing that eventually fired and sued him. Shkreli had previously mocked the lawsuit, saying, “The $65 million Retrophin wants from me would not dent me. I feel great. I’m licking my chops over the suits I’m going to file against them.” A wag observed that Shkreli was arrested only after he bought a rap album and started wearing hoodies, another dubbed him “Karma Bro,” while The New Yorker’s satirical piece was headlined, “Lawyer for Martin Shkreli Hikes Fees Five Thousand Per Cent.”

Former BIDMC CEO Paul Levy writes that news media misreported details about President Jimmy Carter’s cancer, running click-baiting headlines that gave credit to a “miracle drug” (which has actually performed poorly in clinical trials) while downplaying the likely impact of surgery and radiation therapy. Levy quotes a freelance health reporter’s comments at a medical summit in 2009 that sums up the state of medical and health IT journalism pretty well:

It is not our job to satisfy you [physicians], but to keep our readers reading and our viewers viewing. The more responsible the press becomes, the less readers seem to like it.

A fourth co-conspirator pleads guilty to impersonating a Cerner employee in selling medical equipment and $6 million in investments from 50 physicians.

Kaiser Permanente will start its own medical school that will train students on its integrated style of care. The California-based Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine will admit its first class of 48 students in 2019.

Another medical helicopter goes down as two crew members die in an Arizona crash. It was operated by the publicly traded, Colorado-based Air Methods, the self-styled “defenders of tomorrow” that operates medical transport services as well as its 60-aircraft helicopter tourism operation (the recently acquired Blue Hawaiian in Hawaii and Sundance Helicopters in Las Vegas). It also runs a billing company for other medical transport companies, including EMS agencies and ambulance services. The company earned $741 million in revenue where it staffs its own aircraft with medical personnel and bills the patient directly, as well as $162 million from hospital contracts. It earns an average of $12,000 in net revenue per patient transported. As the pie chart above illustrates, federal taxpayers provide 60 percent of the company’s patient revenue. Air Methods likes healthcare reform, predicting that more widespread insurance to pay for its transport services will increase its annual revenue by $31 million. The company’s investor presentation lists its #1 operational challenge as “accidents.” The Glassdoor reviews of Air Methods are pretty bad, with a common theme being that it isn’t really focused on the safety of patients and staff. It has a commendably obtuse and high-falutin’ but questionably punctuated mission statement: “To be the dominant global expert of comprehensive, vertically-integrated, critical care access solutions supporting patient logistics—the movement of patients and their medical analytics.”

Sponsor Updates

• Medicity is positioned in the Leaders category in the 2015 IDC MarketScape.
• LiveProcess is selected as one of 50 Most Promising Healthcare Solution Providers for 2015.
• Medication management solutions vendor HighFive will replace manual mapping of data with SyTrue’s natural language processing and terminology tools.
• CareSync founder and CEO Travis Bond will speak at an SXSW Interactive Festival session titled “Apps and Better Medical Outcomes: Real Solutions.”
• Orion Health launches version 6.2 of its Rhapsody integration engine.
• T-System names five of its ED customers as winners of its client excellence award.
• MedData celebrates its 35th anniversary.
• Inc. Magazine names Lexmark as a new corporate logo that went viral in 2015.
• RedHat makes Glassdoor’s list of companies with the happiest employees.

Blog Posts

• IoT Security: Is Your Fitbit a Key for Criminals? (ID Experts)
• A View through the ICD-10 Looking Glass (Impact Advisors)
• The Data Awakens (Forward Health Group)
• Why SEO is a Must for Hospitals (Influence Health)
• So long spreadsheets! Your transplant data deserves better (Liaison Technologies)
• The Top 10 Elf ICD-10 Moments (MedAptus)
• What do cross-country skis have to do with your EHR running more efficiently? (Nordic)
• Revolutions in Healthcare Analytics Part 4 of 6 – Organizational Readiness (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Mobile Activates and Engages Patients in their Care (PatientSafe Solutions)
• 3 Reasons Why Healthcare Providers Should Take EMV Seriously (Patientco)
•  Med Wreck (PatientKeeper)
• Painting the Future of OB (PeriGen)
• Inaccurate Provider Data is Causing Problems for Patients and Healthcare Providers (Phynd Technologies)
• A Radiologists, a Pathologist … and a Pigeon? (PMD)
• Why the CFO should care about health IT as much as the CIO (Qpid Health)
• Meaningful Use 3: Patient Access (Sagacious Consultants)
• The Business Case for Interoperability: A Q&A with Salim Kizaraly, Founder and SVP, Stella Technology (Stella Technology)
• HDHPs: Patient Engagement for the Checkbook (Streamline Health)
• Sunquest Value of the Month – Agility (Sunquest Information Systems)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

News 12/16/15

Top News

Five foundations, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provide $10 million to expand the reach of the OpenNotes initiative to give patients access to their visit notes.

Reader Comments

From Mutual Arbitration: “Re: arbitration clauses. Now Uber is doing them, only they are blasting them to the smartphones of their drives who have to tap ‘agree’ to keep driving. Leave it to Uber to get 400,000 agreements signed almost instantly.”

From Petal Pusher: “Re: another outrageous hospital billing practice. A friend who was admitted to a major NYC hospital says a clinical psychologist came to his bedside, introduced herself, and asked if he wanted to talk about how he was feeling. Sure, he said, so they spoke for 20-30 minutes. She came back a few days later. Surprise – this was charged to his bill even though it wasn’t told it would be billable, he didn’t ask for it, and it was never ordered for him. He thought it was part of the hospital service, for which they billed $7,700 per day.” I suppose the message here is that when you’re hospitalized, just answering the “how are you doing” question from some stranger who wanders into your room could trigger a bill.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Mrs. Shaw reports that not only were her fourth graders named the top math class in her Pennsylvania school, two of her students were among the top individual scorers as well thanks to the Chromebook and accessories we provided for math practice via DonorsChoose.

I sent the email blast and tweet on my interview with Gerry McCarthy late Monday afternoon. Gerry emailed me four hours later to let me know that he had already received over 300 emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages in response. I appreciate knowing that since, as I told Gerry in reply, HIStalk is to me just an empty room in which I sit while attempting to fill an empty screen each day in a quite personal way, so I don’t have a good view of what it looks like on the other side of that screen even though I’ve been doing it for nearly 13 years.

Webinars

December 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Need for Integrated Data Enhancement and Analytics – Unifying Management of Healthcare Business Processes.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; John Gonsalves, VP of healthcare provider market, CitiusTech. Providers are driving consumer-centric care with guided analytic solutions that answer specific questions, but each new tool adds complexity. It’s also important to tap real-time data from sources such as social platforms, mobile apps, and wearables to support delivery of personalized and proactive care. This webinar will discuss key use cases that drive patient outcomes, the need for consolidated analytics to realize value-based care, scenarios to maximize efficiency, and an overview of CitiusTech’s integrated healthcare data enhancement and analytics platform.

December 16 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “A Sepsis Solution: Reducing Mortality by 50 Percent Using Advanced Decision Support.” Sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Health. Presenters: Rick Corn, VP/CIO, Huntsville Hospital; Stephen Claypool, MD, medical director of the innovation lab, Wolters Kluwer Health. Sepsis claims 258,000 lives and costs $20 billion annually in the US, but early identification and treatment remains elusive, emphasizing the need for intelligent, prompt, and patient-specific clinical decision support. Huntsville Hospital reduced sepsis mortality by 53 percent and related readmissions by 30 percent using real-time surveillance of EHR data and evidence-based decision support to generate highly sensitive and specific alerts.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Here’s the inimitable Vince Ciotti and Frank Poggio doing Tuesday’s webinar, “CPSI Takeover of Healthland, Are You Ready?” You will no doubt be entertained by their wry humor even if you have no horse in that particular race.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Telehealth and videoconferencing platform vendor Vidyo receives a $10 million investment from the venture capital arm of Kaiser Permanente, increasing its total to $163 million.

Telemedicine platform vendor Chiron Health raises $2.3 million in a seed round and releases its patient-facing app. The company allows practices to conduct video visits with guaranteed reimbursement.

Dell is reported to be trying to sell the former Perot Systems for more than $5 billion to help pay for its EMC acquisition, which was previously rumored in early November and reported here. Dell acquired Perot for $3.9 billion in 2009 and is rumored to be talking to Tata, Atos, Genpact, and CGI about buying it.

In a stellar example of how American healthcare is an ugly mix of compassion and profit-seeking, Daughters of Charity Health System (CA) receives a $260 million investment from a hedge fund that also has the option to buy the six-hospital system outright after three years.

Sales

SPH Analytics chooses Clinical Architecture’s Symedical platform for management of clinical and administrative terminologies as well as its SIFT free text semantic interpretation tool.

People

Bill Howard (Caradigm) joins Audacious Inquiry as senior director.

MedSys Group promotes Ann Bartnik to VP of client services.

Lisa Gallagher (HIMSS) and Arien Malec (RelayHealth) will replace John Halamka as co-chairs of the Health IT Standards Committee upon expiration of Halamka’s term in January.

Drug company marketing software vendor OptimizeRX names James Brooks (iCare) as SVP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

Allscripts adds self-pay capability to its FollowMyHealth patient portal by integrating functionality of its Payerpath products.

Bethesda Hospital (MN) goes live hospital-wide with Epic’s MyChart Bedside tablet app for patients and families.

GetWellNetwork announces several recent new sales of its Marbella patient rounding data collection system.

Southwestern Vermont Medical Center goes live on the NetRelay secure messaging tool from Interbit Data.

Technology

Microsoft will end support and updates for Internet Explorer 8 on January 12 but is selling custom support agreements for customers unable to upgrade their browser, many of which I would guess are in health systems. IE8 was released in March 2009, replaced by IE9 in March 2011.

FDA approves the tricorder-like Checkme Pro health monitor from China-based Viatom Technology. It performs one-lead EKGs, pulse oximetry, temperature measurement, movement sensing, and cuffless blood pressure measurement.

Other

A federal judge denies a motion brought by the Texas Medical Board that sought to dismiss Teladoc’s lawsuit against it, allowing the lawsuit to proceed. Teladoc successfully argued that the board’s rule that allows telemedicine sessions only after an initial face-to-face visit unfairly limits competition.

Eric Topol, MD lists his top developments from 2015 that will change medicine.

In England, dating app Tinder helps the NHS raise organ donation awareness among its younger users by suggesting they sign up as donors when they swipe a supporter’s photo.

A Wall Street Journal article recaps recent studies showing that patients resent doctors who spend a significant portion of their encounter working on a computer instead of making eye contact, suggesting that computers aren’t the problem but rather how they are physically positioned and how the doctors choose to use them. It will be interesting to see what happens as medicine shifts to newer graduates unaccustomed to looking up from their phones to see the actual world around them, or perhaps newer patients will be perfectly happy receiving their medical care from the equivalent of a Facebook post and reply.

An interesting New York Times article by Abigail Zuger, MD describes the common situation in which she uses around 10 information systems that each have their own password composition rules and expiration dates, forcing her to keep an index card listing them all in her pocket at all times. She adds, as the subject of the article suggests, that she’s seeing a “retro explosion of paper” as non-interoperable systems force reliance on hand-delivered paper or faxes. She describes what it’s like: “Who knows what the biblical stonemasons sang to themselves during work hours at their Tower of Babel? This is the soundtrack at ours: ‘What exactly did the kidney guy tell you to do?’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘How did the ER explain that?’ ‘Could you just bring in the new pills next time?’”

ProPublica digs into significant problems at the American Red Cross in an article called “The Corporate Takeover of the Red Cross” as the charity struggles in the fifth year under a leadership team that was mostly brought over from AT&T. The article says Red Cross has cut its payroll by a third, eliminated jobs, closed chapters in reducing their number from 700 to 250, alienated volunteers, and bungled several emergency response efforts to the point that some emergency planners have decided not to use its services. Surprisingly, its business of selling donated blood to hospitals lost $100 million in the most recent fiscal year because of revised clinical guidelines that reduced blood demand and its failure to adopt industry standard scannable labels. It plans to increase sales of its CPR training programs from $150 million per year to $700 million fizzled as actual revenue instead dropped. An internal survey found that only 35 percent of employees trust the organization’s executives — many employees call the charity “the AT&T retirement plan” — and volunteer satisfaction dropped 20 percent in one year to 32 percent. The CEO of the Center of Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership, in observing the inept response by Red Cross after a California wildfire while running billboards using the event to solicit donations, concludes, “I view them more as a fundraising and marketing organization than a disaster relief or charity group.”

Sponsor Updates

• Perigen wins an innovation award in clinical information management.
• Black Book ranks Nuance as the leading vendor for clinical documentation improvement solutions.
• DataMotion releases a free Dr. Seuss-like electronic book titled “A Healthcare Holiday Tale: Horace & the Messaging Miracle.”
• Medicat will integrate terminology management software and patient education content from Wolters Kluwer Health with its college health service software.
• PatientPay customer Kids First Pediatrics Group in the Atlanta area reports that it is successfully using the company’s solutions to address the shift from 90 percent insurance-paid claims to 50-percent patient responsibility due to more widespread high-deductible health plans. 
• KLAS names Divurgent as the top-rated vendor in go-live support delivery.
• EClinicalWorks client HealthNet is awarded the 2015 HIMSS Ambulatory Davies Award of Excellence.
• Healthwise’s Catherine Serio publishes “Alone, Adrift, and Hoping for Health.”

Blog Posts

• Meaningful Use Modified Stage 2 (AdvancedMD)
• Innovating at the Intersection of IT and Care (AirStrip)
• The role of patients in readmissions (Besler Consulting)
• Ready or Not? How to gauge your organization’s readiness for new patient engagement technology (Burwood Group)
• Prior Authorization Renewals in CoverMyMeds (CoverMyMeds)
• Please Get Rid of That Superbill (Galen Healthcare Solutions)
• Best Practices for Documentation during Rapid Change (Hayes Management Consulting)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

Monday Morning Update 12/14/15

Top News

Alphabet’s Verily – the just-renamed Google Life Sciences – launches Verb Surgical, which will develop surgical robots in conjunction with Johnson & Johnson.

Reader Comments

From Dickey Ascot: “Re: CareTech Solutions. COO Pat Milostan resigned last week. He follows the resignations of CFO Rob Johnson and Controller Dan Lincoln. Karl Graham, formerly in charge of its service desk, has been reassigned. Since the company was acquired by HCT Global Services of Chennai, india, six executives have resigned as its operation focus has been cost cutting and relocating customer services offshore.” Unverified. The company’s executive page still lists Milostan, Johnson, and Graham in the same roles, as do their individual LinkedIn profiles.

From Bill Duck: “Re: occupations. What would you have been if not a hospital IT person?” I wish I had the skill and personality to be a band manager like Shep Gordon, but since I don’t (and besides, I don’t tolerate prima donnas well), I would probably fall back on some solo endeavor that involves creativity, working mostly alone, a lack of convention, and not working for people or causes I don’t respect. My early days as a clinical analyst hit all of those except the last one, which was a partial match. Actually I guess I have that with HIStalk, which is maybe why I’ve stuck with it for so long. I would probably be a pretty good book editor, especially for non-fiction books.

From All R. Base: “Re: mHealth News. HIMSS Media is shutting it down in favor of recently acquired MobiHealthNews.” I don’t have a reaction since I don’t read either site. As far as I can tell, none of the folks involved have any healthcare or technology background, which is fine when they’re just rewording press releases to sound like expert reporting, but not so fine when they forget that they’re just watching the actual athletes perform as nacho-eating fans.

From Schmarbitration: “Re: arbitration clauses. There was a great series of articles several weeks ago in the NY Times diving into arbitration agreements. The main reason companies do this is to make class actions go away and that has been upheld in pretty much all courts. Sounds like Cerner did this in response to associates being classified as exempt. Epic did the same a few years ago, but with no carrot and a very large stick. People mock frivolous class action suits, but ultimately, they are one of the only tools to keep companies in line when a small amount of damage is spread over large numbers of people.” The article says big companies are eliminating their lawsuit risk by adding a one-sentence arbitration clause (so-called “get out of jail free” cards for corporations) to their agreements, with examples being cable companies, cell phone providers, and online stores. Their customers are unlikely to have the money to pursue arbitration individually rather than signing up with an existing class, so the company gets its way, just like the Wall Street-led credit card companies and retailers intended when they masterminded their protective loophole. A federal judge concludes, “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.” An example is Cerner’s Kansas City neighbor Sprint, which charged $20 roaming fees to customers who never left home, but pocketed the millions because each customer would have been required to hire an expert witness at up to $1 million just to get back their $20. The Supreme Court upheld arbitration clauses starting in 2011, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, who as a private attorney for Discover Bank had been involved in creating them in the first place.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It was just about a 70-30 poll respondent split as to whether their job is a significant part of their identity vs. just a way to pay the bills. Two percent said the most important part of their life is their employment. Furydelabongo would love to become a patient advocate but keeps working as a “disruptive innovator” after realizing that his/her employers in care delivery and healthcare IT don’t keep patient interests foremost. Mobile Man says his need to support the most important thing in his life – his family – has overemphasized his work as part of his self identity. Cassie admits that she associates the majority of her personal value with her work, but wishes she could stop and move into the “it just pays the bills” group.

New poll to your right or here: What is your reaction to Cerner employees becoming ineligible for future pay raises if they refuse to sign an arbitration agreement? Answer and then click the poll’s Comments link to explain, especially if your employer already has such an employment clause in effect. Tick, tock.

Ms. Catoire sent photos from her urban Virginia high school earth sciences class, for which we provided a Chromebook and printer supplies via her DonorsChoose grant request. Her school can’t earn accreditation because it lacks supplies for interactive and hands-on learning, with our donation allowing her to improve individual learning by supporting individual learning styles. She adds, “Just a few of the activities that I use in my class include having the students create animated presentations, movies, mock assessments, and virtual labs, all which have been made possible by your donation … it is because of your generosity that both the students and myself find the teaching and learning process to be so exciting and fulfilling.”

I was thinking about the ridiculous situation where a patient’s in-network hospital has all kinds of out-of-network people running around sending them bills their insurance doesn’t cover. Instead of those “not this one” markings surgeons make to ensure that they don’t amputate the wrong leg, patients need to write in Sharpie on their foreheads, “no out-of-network providers.” Or, perhaps bring their own single form (vs. the mountain of them the hospital requires them to sign) in which the hospital agrees to provide no out-of-network services without prior authorization. It’s pathetic that hospitals take no responsibility for using providers who bill separately without accepting the same insurance. It’s like paying for a pricey restaurant meal and later finding your credit hard hit for charges from the chef, florist, and exterminator.

The Meaningful Love Program

I hereby propose that the federal government turn over responsibility for managing the IRS’s “married filing jointly” tax break. Couples can expect these changes.

• Couples who want to file jointly will be required to participate in the Meaningful Love program, in which they will document the quality of their relationship using  government-certified software called Electronic Marital Records (EMRs).
• Conversations and other intimate encounters must be documented via a series of EMR checkboxes and predefined text strings as entered on ever-present computers positioned between them at all times, with the administrative burden estimated at eight distracted minutes of the average 12-minute encounter.
• Heartfelt handwritten cards and murmuring phone calls will be eliminated in favor of email templates (CPOE, or Computerized Partner Outlook Entry) composed by choosing from a series of government-approved drop-down phrases to improve legibility and standardization.
• Marital decision support will be used to provide evidence-based recommendations such as anniversary reminders, suggested behavioral changes based on menstrual cycle tracking, and time-since-last-sex alerts.
• Each couple must maintain a marital problem list that they reconcile during each encounter.
• EMR records must be sent electronically upon request to anyone with whom either partner might wish to arrange an outside dalliance or in the case of divorce where the new partner would benefit from having the old partner’s EMR data. This will improve the urgent “unconscious person in my bed – what do I do without a history?” scenario as long as all US couples participate despite a lack of incentive for doing so. Future program enhancements will provide the other partner a real-time alert when the tryst has been scheduled.
• The amount of the tax break will be pro-rated based on mutual attestation that the relationship is loving, the surveyed satisfaction of both people, and their romantic performance as benchmarked against other couples.
• The Eligible Pair (EP) must submit their EMR-generated marriage quality data to the appropriate state and federal agencies and for the benefit of unmarried researchers who are trying to understand how relationships work.

These requirements are being protested by the American Marital Association and the EMR vendor-sponsored social media campaign #LetLoversBeLovers, but in the mean time, couples who are unwilling to share their marital bed with Uncle Sam just to avoid a few dollars in penalties can opt out by filing individual tax returns.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Cerner tells employees to sign away their right to sue the company or else they will never be given pay increases.
• Ascension Health buys almost half of Accretive Health and signs a 10-year revenue cycle agreement with the company.
• UL acquires IT accreditor InfoGard, which certifies EHR and EPCS systems.
• National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD tells a group that public health receives only 3 percent of federal health expenditures vs. 97 percent paid to deliver medical services even though 80 percent of health doesn’t involve doctors and hospitals.

Webinars

December 15 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “CPSI’s Takeover of Healthland.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank Poggio, CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, H.I.S. Professionals. Frank and Vince are back with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about the acquisition. They will review industry precedents (such as Cerner-Siemens), the possible fate of each Healthland product, the available alternatives, and steps Healthland customers should take now. Their previous webinar that covered Cerner’s takeover of Siemens has drawn nearly 7,000 views and this one promises to be equally informative and entertaining.

December 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Need for Integrated Data Enhancement and Analytics – Unifying Management of Healthcare Business Processes.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; John Gonsalves, VP of healthcare provider market, CitiusTech. Providers are driving consumer-centric care with guided analytic solutions that answer specific questions, but each new tool adds complexity. It’s also important to tap real-time data from sources such as social platforms, mobile apps, and wearables to support delivery of personalized and proactive care. This webinar will discuss key use cases that drive patient outcomes, the need for consolidated analytics to realize value-based care, scenarios to maximize efficiency, and an overview of CitiusTech’s integrated healthcare data enhancement and analytics platform.

December 16 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “A Sepsis Solution: Reducing Mortality by 50 Percent Using Advanced Decision Support.” Sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Health. Presenters: Rick Corn, VP/CIO, Huntsville Hospital; Stephen Claypool, MD, medical director of the innovation lab, Wolters Kluwer Health. Sepsis claims 258,000 lives and costs $20 billion annually in the US, but early identification and treatment remains elusive, emphasizing the need for intelligent, prompt, and patient-specific clinical decision support. Huntsville Hospital reduced sepsis mortality by 53 percent and related readmissions by 30 percent using real-time surveillance of EHR data and evidence-based decision support to generate highly sensitive and specific alerts.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Sales

Kaleida Health (NY) chooses Ascend Software for accounts payable document imaging.

People

Baptist Memorial Healthcare (TN) adds CIO to responsibilities of Beverly Jordan, RN, its VP/chief clinical transformation officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Versus Technology announces a new Wi-Fi locating platform and asset tags.

Government and Politics

National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH calls for health IT stakeholders to commit to providing consumer access, avoiding information blocking, and following standards to support her vision of a connected health system that includes an app store of FHIR-based consumer tools.

An essay in the Wall Street Journal says the Affordable Care Act is “neither the triumph trumpeted by its proponents nor the disaster suggested by its critics.” ACA’s positives include reducing the number of uninsured patients, its possible effect on slowing healthcare spending growth, the upcoming Cadillac tax that encourages employers to control low-value spending, and the creation of a more cost-conscious market than existed with employer-provided insurance. Its negatives are rising numbers of insured thanks to Medicaid expansion that is “more like welfare for the medical-industrial complex than support for the needy” and being promoted as budget-neutral when it isn’t. The article concludes, “Both sides also need to recognize that the changes in incentives necessary to bend the cost curve will be highly unwelcome to many Americans. Markets for health care are the perfect example of the old saying that ‘every dollar of waste is someone’s income.’”

Technology

Several high-profile Silicon Valley technology entrepreneurs, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, donate $1 billion to launch non-profit OpenAI, which will develop artificial intelligence technologies that benefit humanity without worrying about profit. They might be surprised to find that healthcare’s use of AI and other technologies always has profit first and foremost, with benefit to patients coincidental.

The Chicago Tribune observes EHR-caused doctor burnout, focusing on doctors turned into data entry clerks and patient visits that emphasize clicks and drop-downs rather than paying attention to what patients tell them.

Other

Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli is getting the publicity exposure of his life and not just for raising Daraprim prices 5,000 percent and buying $2 million rap albums. Shares in the failing biotech company he bought a few weeks ago for $1.50 are now trading at $28 as investors express confidence that newly named CEO Shkreli will figure out a way to rape the system. Apparently he has – the company has exclusively licensed a drug not available in the US that is used to treat an uncommon parasitic disease. The drug sells for $50 per course of therapy and Shkreli says he’ll raise the price to the $60,000 to $100,000 range. About 300,000 people in the US have the disease, almost all of them Latin American immigrants who entered the country with it, and Shkreli estimates that 3,000 to 7,000 of them will need treatment each year. Even if the market doesn’t pan out, Shkreli has another path to quick profits – he is petitioning the FDA to grant him a fast-track research voucher that he can resell to another drug company for up to $350 million, which benefitted Shkreli’s previous drug company that sold one of the free FDA vouchers for $245 million. I admit that I would invest in his companies since his entire focus is on enriching himself and his investors without letting altruistic emotions interfere with his lust for profit.

A new Missouri law addresses the physician shortage by eliminating residency requirements, allowing newly graduated medical students to start practicing immediately. Medical associations don’t like the law, saying medical schools aren’t set up to prepare their graduates to start practice immediately, perhaps forgetting that residencies were neither mandatory or common for non-specialists outside of urban areas in the early 1980s. So far no new graduates have taken advantage of the change, however, probably realizing that it’s a career gamble that won’t pay off if other states don’t follow suit.

A former part-time employee of New York cardiologist Hussain Khawaja, MD sues him, claiming he fired her looking up her computerized hospital records to determine that she was pregnant. She says the doctor told her while recruiting for other positions that he doesn’t hire applicants with children.

New York’s tax department notifies 1,900 taxpayers who worked for Erie County Medical Center in 2012 that they owe the state money because miscoded hospital W2 forms gave them a pension deduction to which they weren’t entitled. The hospital found a bug in its payroll system and says it will pay the interest, fees, and penalties for those affected and will even provide up to $200 to those who hire a tax preparer to amend their 2012 tax forms.

Medical helicopters seem to crash a lot given their small numbers, with 78 deaths in the past decade. In a new example, a patient and three rescue personnel die when a SkyLife air ambulance goes down in fog and rain in California. I’ve known folks on hospital helicopter teams and it’s a funny business, with such high cost for so few deployments that ROI (other than for dramatic hospital photos) is tough to justify. I would guess in the vast majority of countries where healthcare is a service rather than a private industry the number of such helicopters is low. As was eloquently stated in “The Right Stuff” even though it wasn’t talking about insurance companies or taxpayer subsidies, “no bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

Magician Penn Jillette turns into a pitchman for Withings after using the company’s smart scale and blood pressure monitor to lose 120 pounds in switching to a plant-based diet.  He explains, “It’s just making it automatic and instant. It doesn’t allow a guy like me to spin information — something I’m normally very good at. A little tool, a little bit of a nudge, can make a huge difference.” Penn will be all set if Withings invents a scale to monitor his still-overweight obnoxiousness.

Sponsor Updates

• TransUnion Healthcare identifies more than $1 billion in insurance payments for hospitals.
• Versus joins the Cisco solution partner program.
• Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner will keynote Zynx Health’s Care Guidance 2016 event May 23-26, 2016 in New Orleans.

Blog Posts

• Dissecting the healthcare dress code: Why professional appearances and behaviors matter (T-System)
• Operational Inefficiency can be Fixed (TeleTracking)
• Top Takeaways from NHCAA’s 2015 Annual Training Conference (Verisk Health)
• VUE in review (Voalte)
• 12 Days of Giveaways (Nordic)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

News 12/11/15

Top News

Maryland fires Computer Sciences Corp. from a $300 million Medicaid computer contract for unacceptable performance and may sue the company to recoup some of the $30 million it has already spent. It had suspended the contract in February. The state’s track record for health IT projects isn’t so good: it also threatened to sue Noridian Healthcare Solutions, the contractor of its health insurance exchange that failed within minutes of its October 1, 2013 go-live, but instead settled for $45 million in July 2015. Most of the wasted money for both Maryland projects, more than $200 million, came from federal taxpayers, although Maryland’s tally is less impressive than Oregon’s squandering of more than $300 million of federal money for an insurance exchange that never even went live. CSC’s record isn’t great, with state Medicaid system problems in North Carolina and a key role in the massive failure of NPfIT in England.

Reader Comments

From Rude Boy: “Re: Greenway. Taking direct aim at NextGen in this mailing sent to customers.”

From Clam Chowdah: “Re: Brigham and Women’s. Apart from cost overruns, the main operational issues have been because of radiology and one of their legacy systems. Overall, Epic has performed well.”

From Memphis Hank: “Re: executives of big software companies who not only studied, but also taught software engineering or computer science. Along with Epic, there’s also Adobe, SAS, and ESRI. An interesting follow-up analysis would be: what happens to products and customers when geek founders are replaced by private equity and other finance-centric executives?” Big companies run by technologists are about as rare as big health systems run by clinicians.

From Hot Tub Club: “Re: funny video. Remember this one you wrote up years ago?” I remember the dry-humored, four-part video from 2009 in which a slick but clueless salesperson (“I’m not really familiar with what our software things do”) meets with an annoyed and sometimes profane CIO. I was trying to recall the animation tool used and finally remembered that it was Xtranormal, which shut down in 2013.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I took my car in for an oil change and got a rare look at daytime TV with a laugh-inducing sight: Dr. Oz wearing scrubs on a talk show as though he might be called upon to perform an impromptu, on-screen surgery on one of the incessantly chatty hosts.

Watching: Jane the Virgin, a witty, fast-paced, and non-profane comedy that has Season 1 on Netflix. I had to give up on American Horror Story because of its overreliance on profanity and graphic violence in Season 2, but that’s OK since I rarely watch TV anyway.

Nick van Terheyden followed up on his observation that HIStalk is blocked by the government in United Arab Emirates, which I thought might be a technical issue instead since several of my Dubai readers say they can read it just fine.  Dr. Nick asked the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company to unblock it, but they said it’s intentional per Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. Beats me why.

Last chance to nominate your choices for the HISsies awards. I’ll be emailing ballots to the people who have signed up for HIStalk updates in the next few days. It’s easy to spot the company-encouraged employee responses because the respondents skip most of the categories except Best Vendor and Best Leader and enter their company and CEO names there.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Physicians in rural West Virginia feel the effects of high-speed broadband connections. Hattiesburg Clinic and HealthNet receive HIMSS accolades for their use of health IT. Performance Physical Therapy CEO Michelle Collie outlines the health IT challenges faced by PT practices. Allscripts breaks ground on a new office tower. MediKey partners with Teladoc and EDocAmerica. WebPT expands into new Phoenix digs. Brazilian physicians lead the way in communicating with patients via WhatsApp. Everseat CEO Jeff Peres details the impact of unfilled practice seats.

Webinars

December 15 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “CPSI’s Takeover of Healthland.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank Poggio, CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, H.I.S. Professionals. Frank and Vince are back with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about the acquisition. They will review industry precedents (such as Cerner-Siemens), the possible fate of each Healthland product, the available alternatives, and steps Healthland customers should take now. Their previous webinar that covered Cerner’s takeover of Siemens has drawn nearly 7,000 views and this one promises to be equally informative and entertaining.

December 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Need for Integrated Data Enhancement and Analytics – Unifying Management of Healthcare Business Processes.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; John Gonsalves, VP of healthcare provider market, CitiusTech. Providers are driving consumer-centric care with guided analytic solutions that answer specific questions, but each new tool adds complexity. It’s also important to tap real-time data from sources such as social platforms, mobile apps, and wearables to support delivery of personalized and proactive care. This webinar will discuss key use cases that drive patient outcomes, the need for consolidated analytics to realize value-based care, scenarios to maximize efficiency, and an overview of CitiusTech’s integrated healthcare data enhancement and analytics platform.

December 16 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “A Sepsis Solution: Reducing Mortality by 50 Percent Using Advanced Decision Support.” Sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Health. Presenters: Rick Corn, VP/CIO, Huntsville Hospital; Stephen Claypool, MD, medical director of the innovation lab, Wolters Kluwer Health. Sepsis claims 258,000 lives and costs $20 billion annually in the US, but early identification and treatment remains elusive, emphasizing the need for intelligent, prompt, and patient-specific clinical decision support. Huntsville Hospital reduced sepsis mortality by 53 percent and related readmissions by 30 percent using real-time surveillance of EHR data and evidence-based decision support to generate highly sensitive and specific alerts.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Express Scripts will invest $25 million in revenue-generating health IT companies related to drug adherence and personalized care. Actually the announcement says the investments will focus on “prescription drug adherence,” so I assume those who are addicted to street drugs are already adhering just fine on their own.

India-based Tata Consultancy Services will join Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s CTTC commercialization group to develop products related to bioinformatics, care management, and analytics.

Goldman Sachs and other investors provide $41 million in funding for doctor search site Vitals, raising its total to $86 million.

Sales

Adventist Health System chooses Athenahealth’s EHR, PM, and patient engagement services for its 1,600 employed physicians.

Ascension Health signs an exclusive, 10-year revenue cycle agreement with Accretive Health and will invest $200 million in the company. That’s an interesting development given that Ascension tried to buy Accretive this past June, was turned down by Accretive, and then announced that it would not renew its contract with Accretive that was to expire in 2017, forcing Accretive to “undertake a review of strategic alternatives” at the prospect of losing a customer that represented 50 percent of its business. Accretive shares jumped around 50 percent following the latest announcement, but are trading at 90 percent less than their mid-2011 price and at about half the share price at the time Ascension offered to buy the company. Accretive’s market cap is $300 million, so a $200 million investment must represent at least a 50 percent stake.

People

LogicStream Health names Jack Hauser (Ability Network) as CFO.

Scripps Health (CA) names Andy Crowder (MaineHealth)  as SVP/CIO.

Gurpreet Singh (MD Revolution) joins CareSync as VP of interoperability. The company says it has hired 60 employees since it announced $18 million in Series D funding in October.

HIMSS and CHIME name Craig Richardville, SVP/CIO of Carolinas HealthCare System, as John E. Gall, Jr. CIO of the Year.

Announcements and Implementations

SCL Health (CO) offers $40 physician video visits via Doctor On Demand.

Orion Health launches Amadeus, a data platform that offers predictive modeling and machine learning to support precision medicine. It also features open APIs for developers to create additional services.

Idaho HIE goes live on a clinical portal from Orion Health.

Government and Politics

CMS says that 2.8 million people have signed up for insurance via Healthcare.gov, one million of them first-timers. Healthcare.gov CEO Kevin Counihan say 80 percent of consumers can find coverage for less than $75 per month after government subsidies.

The White House announces mental health hackathons and data sprints on Saturday, December 12 in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

Privacy and Security

A federal judge denies LabMD’s request for sanctions against security vendor Tiversa, which LabMD said intentionally breached its systems and then threatened to report the company to the government if it didn’t buy Tiversa’s security services, resulting in LabMD’s eventual shutdown after a long Federal Trade Commission fight. Meanwhile, Tivera’s CEO, stung by accusations of extortionate sales practices in LabMD’s case, writes a Wall Street Journal letter titled, “Tiversa Was a Good Samaritan, Not a Bully” in which he states that the company sent LabMD a services proposal at the company’s own request without any threat that it would otherwise tell the FTC about the exposed information. He blames a former Tiversa employee turned whistleblower who has “a history of not telling the truth.” He says Tiversa is suing LabMD and its former employee for defamation. 

The FBI finds patient information from MaineGeneral Health online and alerts the health system, which says radiology patient information is at highest risk. Employee and prospective donor information was also taken.

A hospital employee and his wife are charged with stealing the information of 80 patients to take over their credit card accounts and fraudulently charge $300,000 worth of upscale fashions and accessories.

Technology

A study finds that two-thirds of doctors in Italy and nearly 90 percent in Brazil communicate with their patients via the WhatsApp messenger app.

Shriners Hospital for Children (UT) tests its new telemedicine system by offering children video chats with Santa Claus.

Other

A Mayo Clinic Proceedings article looks at physician burnout, which it unsurprisingly concludes is getting worse. It should have added a third axis of average income by specialty, which would have shown that internal medicine and family medicine have high burnout paired with lower incomes compared to their equally burned out but higher-earning peers in orthopedic surgery and radiology.

A Kansas City TV station reports that Cerner is requiring its employees to sign an arbitration agreement that prevents them from suing the company for any reason, offering them $500 in stock options if they signed by December 8 but denying them future merit pay increases if they didn’t. Employees had previously filed two class action lawsuits claiming they were incorrectly classified as salaried employees and thus were denied overtime pay. The arbitration clause would eliminate the possibility of such lawsuits. An anonymous Cerner employs speculates on Reddit (not entirely convincingly) that Cerner is trying to work around terms of its Siemens HS acquisition that require it to use Siemens service years to calculate severance pays in the case of Malvern layoffs.

Regina Holliday is running a GoFundMe campaign in hopes of raising $10,000 toward her expenses in creating The Walking Gallery jackets. I should also mention her excellent book, “The Writing on the Wall,” that came out earlier this year. I see it’s now available for Kindle as well as softcover. I thought it was superb and I strongly recommend it.

The mystery buyer of the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan rap album — the most expensive in history at $2 million for the only copy that will ever be sold — is revealed to be the most-hated man on the Internet, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO, pharma bad boy, and aspiring rap producer Martin Shkreli. Shkreli says be bought it hoping he can hang out with celebrities who want to hear the album (he’s hoping for Taylor Swift), but when asked if will stream it free for Wu-Tang fans, he replied with the same logic that’s behind his 5,000 percent price hike for Daraprim, “Why would I pay millions of dollars just to let everyone listen to it for free?” He says he may commission more bands to make albums for his ears only just because he can.

Weird News Andy predicts “Sold Out in Chicago,” as FDA approves commercial sale of a former military-only device that injects sponges into a bullet wound to stop bleeding in 20 seconds. The sponges are tagged with radiopaque markers so they can be detected and removed later.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe adds Robert Rinek of Paper Jaffray and Brant Heise of Memorial Care Innovation Fund to its board.
• Health Catalyst is named a “best place to work” on three lists, two national and one regional.
• PeriGen’s Emily Hamilton is published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
• Streamline Health Solutions signs a reseller agreement with outsourcing solutions provider Himagine Solutions.
• InterSystems receives the HIMSS Middle East Integrated Health Innovations Award 2015 – mHealth category.
• MedCPU will host four US-based hospital CIOs December 14 in Israel as part of a CHIME/Israel Export & International Cooperative Institute event.

Blog Posts

• Mission Possible: Making Data Available for Population Health (Medicity)
• A Case for Clinical Researchers to Launch Secure Texting Trials (Practice Unite)
• Mobility, Network Effects, and Smart Point-of-Care Mobile Solutions (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Private Cloud – A Good Choice for Regulated Industries (NTT Data)
• Three Ways to Reduce Strain on Your Training Team (Sagacious Consultants)
• The Ever-Expanding Discharge Summary (Streamline Health)
• Top Four Privacy and Security Predictions for 2016 (ID Experts)
• Get Connected! Technology Shapes Patient Engagement for Hospitals Nationwide (Influence Health)
• New Approach to Open Enrollment: The Key Role of Healthcare Payments (InstaMed)
• Physician Burnout: Only Getting Worse (MedAptus)
• Precision Medicine – The Greatest Healthcare Innovation since Antibiotics, Hygiene, and Immunization (Orion Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.

News 12/9/15

Top News

Acting Assistant Secretary for Health and National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH tells a group that US public health is “marginalized and under-funded” as 97 percent of available federal money is spent on delivery of medical services even though 80 percent of health factors don’t involve hospitals and doctors’ offices. She adds, “The notion of population health doesn’t end with a geographic boundary … it’s everybody in the community,” giving the example that parts of Baltimore have worse health than North Korea.

Reader Comments

From The Freshman Whisperer: “Re: Hour of Code. I was at a ninth-grade career fair last week telling students the story of technology and how the healthcare industry needs help. As a part our booth, we had students try Hour of Code. I was happy to hear that many students had tried coding before (lots even enjoyed it) and were considering a career in computer science. I wasn’t offered any coding classes in high school. Thumbs up for teachers teaching young coders. My company can’t hire enough of them!”

From Health Dataphile: “Re: HCA’s inpatient and outpatient facilities in the Southeast. Meditech went down over the weekend and, as far as I know, is still down as of Monday morning.” Unverified. Usually an outage of that magnitude would be related to data center communications or some type of network failure, which HCA might be prone to since it deploys Meditech and other systems regionally. That might be a lesson for everyone anxious to get out of the operations business and move to a cloud provider – cloud systems are probably better architected, but they can still go down or you can lose access to them if something happens to your real-world connectivity. A reader in an HCA hospital in Florida says the ICU nurses didn’t know the downtime protocol they were supposed to be following, but on the bright side, doctors fell back to writing and dictating orders instead of entering them into the computer, allowing them to leave for home earlier than ever. The nurses were worried about medication reconciliation between the MARs and Pyxis machines.

From This Is Just Silly: “Re: Judy Faulkner’s letter on exhibit at the Smithsonian. I would have rather seen the letter or email she sent to George Halvorson at Kaiser Permanente when she turned down KP’s interest in buying Epic.” The National Museum of American History’s just-opened “Giving in America” exhibit includes the letter Faulkner wrote in pledging that she will donate 99 percent of her $3 billion fortune to charity. I was just thinking that Epic must be one of very few hugely valued companies where both top executives studied computer science.

From Unscheduled: “Re: McKesson’s scheduling software. I’m hearing it is ending support. Do you know if that’s true?” I don’t, but anyone who does is welcome to comment.

From Ground Pounder: “Re: salary survey. Cute infographic hides terrible methodology.” It’s puzzling why reasonably smart people will believe a dumbed-down graphic instead of paying attention to what it’s based on, although far less puzzling why crappy “news” sites run the graphic as clickbait. The members-only report is based on a survey of only 700 people who were apparently self-selected, meaning any conclusions it attempts to draw are not believable, especially when it tries to segment the responses into subcategories. Here are some headlines the self-promoting report drew by sites that simply reworded the press release, with extra points for the first entry (which turned it into a “listicle” like you’d see on celebrity gossip sites) and the last entry (which seems to attempt a Donna Summer song pun):

• Health IT professionals think they’re underpaid: This and 9 more findings on IT salaries
• Average healthcare IT salary tops $87,000, job tracker survey finds
• Average Health IT Salary Down, but Job Satisfaction Up, Report Finds
• Health IT Professionals Report High Salaries, Job Satisfaction
• Survey: HIT workers get lower salaries than desired
• Infographic: Health IT workforce paid well, but perhaps not enough
• Health IT Pros See High Salaries Due to Increased HIT Needs
• Working Hard for the Money

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HISsies nominations will remain open for a few more days. The best nomination I’ve received so far is in the “smartest vendor action taken” category, where someone offered, “Hiring hookers to seduce my COO.” Athenahealth has obviously put the word out to employees as indicated by both boilerplate nominations in several categories and repeated IP addresses that are dominating the responses, but that’s OK since the final ballot will be delivered by the unstuffable ballot box of direct email.

Ms. Lam from California says she assigned her first graders, most of whom are from immigrant families in which English is their second language, to work with fourth-grade partners using the hands-on Make Wonder programming and robotics kit we provided by funding her DonorsChoose grant.

I wrote earlier this week about a friend who keeps working for her vendor employer even while fighting the cancer that will almost surely kill her because she’s worried she isn’t replaceable at work. It resonated with a reader who sent me an internal executive email exchange from a few years ago. An employee of a large health IT vendor was determined to keep working despite having cancer (of which she died shortly after) so that her retirement plan could vest for her surviving family. I’m paraphrasing the exchange below:

[Executive to CFO]: The employee thinks she needs to push through and keep working even though it will be one of the last things she will do on this Earth. Without being too nosy, can we vest the retirement even though the dates haven’t arrived?

[CFO] I want to make this happen and will approve the change under my board-delegated authority. Consider this as my approval. This is the only time I have ever approved such an action, but it seemed appropriate. A great example of why it feels great to work at [vendor name omitted].

[CEO] I am in complete agreement. Today is a gift – that is why they call it the present. 

Webinars

December 9 (Wednesday) 12 noon ET. “Population Health in 2016: Know How to Move Forward.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenter: Michael Maus, VP of enterprise solutions, Athenahealth. ACOs need a population health solution that helps them manage costs, improve outcomes, and elevate the care experience. Athenahealth’s in-house expert will explain why relying on software along isn’t enough, how to tap into data from multiple vendors, and how providers can manage patient populations.

December 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Health Care Payment Evolution: Maximizing Value Through Technology.” Sponsored by Medicity. Presenter: Charles D. Kennedy, MD, chief population health officer, Healthagen. This presentation will provide a brief history of the ACO Pioneer and MSSP programs and will discuss current market trends and drivers and the federal government’s response to them. Learn what’s coming in the next generation of programs such as the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and the role technology plays in driving the evolution of a new healthcare marketplace.

December 15 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “CPSI’s Takeover of Healthland.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank Poggio, CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, H.I.S. Professionals. Frank and Vince are back with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about the acquisition. They will review industry precedents (such as Cerner-Siemens), the possible fate of each Healthland product, the available alternatives, and steps Healthland customers should take now. Their previous webinar that covered Cerner’s takeover of Siemens has drawn nearly 7,000 views and this one promises to be equally informative and entertaining.

December 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A Sepsis Solution: Reducing Mortality by 50 Percent Using Advanced Decision Support.” Sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Health. Presenters: Rick Corn, VP/CIO, Huntsville Hospital; Stephen Claypool, MD, medical director of the innovation lab, Wolters Kluwer Health. Sepsis claims 258,000 lives and costs $20 billion annually in the US, but early identification and treatment remains elusive, emphasizing the need for intelligent, prompt, and patient-specific clinical decision support. Huntsville Hospital reduced sepsis mortality by 53 percent and related readmissions by 30 percent using real-time surveillance of EHR data and evidence-based decision support to generate highly sensitive and specific alerts.

December 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Need for Integrated Data Enhancement and Analytics – Unifying Management of Healthcare Business Processes.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; John Gonsalves, VP of healthcare provider market, CitiusTech. Providers are driving consumer-centric care with guided analytic solutions that answer specific questions, but each new tool adds complexity. It’s also important to tap real-time data from sources such as social platforms, mobile apps, and wearables to support delivery of personalized and proactive care. This webinar will discuss key use cases that drive patient outcomes, the need for consolidated analytics to realize value-based care, scenarios to maximize efficiency, and an overview of CitiusTech’s integrated healthcare data enhancement and analytics platform.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

San Diego-based MD Revolution raises $23 million. It offers a patient engagement platform that allows providers to bill Medicare for delivering chronic care management services.

UL acquires InfoGard, an IT accreditor whose offerings include certification of EHRs and electronic prescribing of controlled substances systems.

EClinicalWorks will spend $30 million in India to build a data center and increase its 1,000-employee headcount there by at least 300 in the next three months. The company will offer consumers in India an app to view lab results, find doctors, maintain personal health records, and schedule appointments. The company has already signed 40 hospitals and 20 practices in India.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the strategy behind the turnaround of Valeant Pharmaceuticals that has brought criticism as well as a 4,000 percent share price increase that gave its CEO $2 billion in holdings:

• Cut research and development expense.
• Take over dozens of drug companies.
• Buy undervalued drugs and raise their prices.
• Focus on skin treatments, mostly just redesigning old ones rather than researching new ones, knowing that dermatologists are responsive to drug salespeople and prescribe by habit.
• Sell its dermatology products through a now-closed mail order pharmacy that used aggressive sales tactics.

Twine Health, which offers health coaching software developed at MIT, raises $6.75 million.

San Francisco-based concierge medicine provider One Medical Group raises $65 million to expand its service area and to further develop its enterprise and mobile technology solutions, increasing its total to $182 million.

Google has renamed many of its business and does the same with Google Life Sciences medical device group, now known as Verily. Meanwhile, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) says it is less interested in seed-stage investing and will instead pursue more mature companies, with an ongoing emphasis on healthcare and life sciences firms.

Harris Computer Systems relocates its QuadraMed EMPI Solutions business to a high security office in Plano, TX that can house up to 100 employees.

Sales

Weirton Medical Center (WV) chooses Besler Consulting’s Transfer DRG Revenue Recovery Service.

Scripps Health (CA) chooses the Health Gorilla Clinical Network to provide patients with access to imaging and lab information.

Announcements and Implementations

Intelligent Medical Objects announces GA of its 2.0 release that includes silent terminology updates, support for natural language processing, quarterly refreshes of major dictionaries, and a CQM dashboard.

PatientPay announces that customer Greenwood Pediatrics (CO) reduced its billing costs by 47 percent by switching from paper to the company’s online bill review and payment.

Cloud hosting provider Infinitely Virtual announces that it has passed the HIPAA audit that allows it to offer health IT hosting plans, including a $10 per month option for full-disk encryption for each virtual machine.

Telemedicine services company Virtual Radiologic announces that it has applied artificial intelligence to data from the 90,000 head CTs it performs monthly to create a real-time warning to its teleradiologists that a patient might be experiencing intracranial hemorrhage.

A Finland-based software vendor licenses a web-based geriatric assessment system developed by the University of Queensland in Australia. The software records and monitors the progress of elderly patients before, during, and after hospital stays and can be used to deliver telehealth services. The CeGa Online system is already offered by Queensland Health. The same researchers have also developed a residential care version.

SAP announces software for medical data analysis and clinical trials recruitment.

Government and Politics

The White House enlists ZocDoc and Oscar Health Insurance Corp. to provide free advertising that will urge uninsured people to buy insurance via Healthcare.gov in the final week of open enrollment. ZocDoc will target customers who have paid cash for the appointments they booked through its scheduling service, while Oscar chas reated an explainer video that it will distribute in the handful of states where it sells plans.

Privacy and Security

A physician-written editorial in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons says that patient privacy is an illusion because of electronic medical records that make data available without patient consent for oversight and research. The psychiatrist, Susan Israel, MD, wants EHRs redesigned to give patients control of their information via consent requirements “regardless of cost and complexities involved.” 

Innovation and Research

Google patents a needle-free blood draw system that uses compressed gas to pierce skin and then draw the resulting blood into a collection chamber. The patient covers two possible devices, one for diabetic finger-sticks and the other worn as a wristband. Companies seem to be enchanted with the idea that patients need an alternative to needles and the collection volume of standard blood draws, but for me, that’s far less important than avoiding the inhospitable long waits at LabCorp and Quest drawing centers full of people whose NPO stomachs growl as they watch awful TV shows that working people rarely see.

Technology

Carequality releases its interoperability framework (legal terms policies, technical specifications, and governance processes) that allows organizations to quickly establish data sharing agreements with partners.

Other

Brigham and Women’s Hospital misses its budget surplus target for FY2015 by $53 million, which it blames on weather, employee retirement costs, and the cost of transitioning to Epic. The hospital had budgeted $47 million for its Epic conversion, but instead spent $74 million. Revenue also fell short by $13.5 million as employees didn’t code cases correctly on Epic.

A summary of McKinsey’s previous healthcare consumerism studies concludes that while patients say their outcome is the most important factor in their satisfaction with providers, it’s actually clinician empathy (especially from nurses) and the information they are given before and after treatment that is most closely correlated to satisfaction. Access to medical records wasn’t all that important and neither was the perception of value received. A study also found that while 40-50 percent of patients aged 18-34 want to use technology to speak to their provider by phone, schedule appointments, and check health status, the percentage drops sharply for those aged 35-55. Respondents are also willing to share health monitoring data capture with their PCPs, but not very many would do so with friends, family, insurance companies, and employers.

Researchers mine EHR databases at two hospitals to detect a previously unknown correlation between the use of androgen deprivation therapy and later development of Alzheimer’s disease. The study used text-based data mining methods developed by one of the authors that were patented by Stanford University. The hidden value of a study like this is that researchers can look at the entire patient population of a health system rather than just individual patients who opt in for a study that was designed to test a particular theory.

A study in England proves that patients are as clueless about antibiotics as doctors keep saying. Two-thirds of them expect to get an antibiotic prescription for a cold or flu, one-third think they should stop taking antibiotics once they feel better, and three-quarters believe it’s the human body rather than bacteria that grow resistant to the drugs. Doctors who apply sound science to writing antibiotic prescriptions are seeing their patient satisfaction ratings fall, with a 3- to 6-percentile drop for every 25 percent reduction in prescriptions. The other GPs just keep cranking them out to keep patients happy, with half of those patients receiving an inappropriate antibiotic prescription. 

A Florida woman is jailed for hit and run when her car’s crash-triggered electronic monitoring system automatically calls 911. The operator, suspicious of the woman’s insistence that nothing had happened when the device clearly showed that it had, dispatched police, who found her car damaged with the airbag deployed.

Sponsor Updates

• Forrester Research ranks AirWatch as an enterprise mobile management leader.
• TransUnion Healthcare announces that its eScan product has found patient insurance coverage worth $1 billion in hospital payments that would have otherwise been written off to bad debt and charity care.
• Sixteen Influence Health clients receive eHealth Leadership Awards.
• LiveProcess exhibits at the National Healthcare Coalition Preparedness Conference through December 4 in San Diego.
• Oneview Healthcare launches an internship competition.

Blog Posts

• 5 Year-End Tips to Get the Most Out of 2016 (AdvancedMD)
• FHIR Up Population Health (Caradigm)
• The Fine Line Between Implementation & Optimization (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• The Biggest, Baddest Breaches of 2015 (ID Experts)
• Giving Thanks for Family (Impact Advisors)
• Healthcare’s Black Friday: Lessons Providers can Learn from Retail’s Biggest Day (InstaMed)
• Is Your Business a Center of Excellence? Probably! (Liaison Technologies)
• Key Steps to an Effective Image Exchange Implementation (LifeImage)
• The Top Ten Thanksgiving Mishaps via ICD-10 (MedAptus)
• Training Patient Service Representatives to Make a Difference (MedData)
• Ready to Take Your Place in the Cockpit? What Healthcare BI Strategies Have in Common with Altimeters and Accelerometers (Navicure)
• Dictate and Review Images Simultaneously: See How at RSNA 2015 (NVoq)
• Meet Susan Anderson, Managing Director for Orion Health Canada (Orion Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us or send news tips online.